amelioration
A few days ago, I started talking more and more to an acquaintance from work. R messaged me online first, and she said she did it because she had heard that I didn’t like it at Princeton.
Truth be told, there are a lot of things about Princeton that I don’t like, and when I first got here, it was really bad. I hated it, and after a while I gave up trying to like it and just stayed in my room all the time. Pretty soon, everyone back home at my high school heard that I was having such a horrible time, and I think I probably cost Princeton a good 20-30 solid applicants this year. Oops.
R, like me, came primarily for reasons like financial aid and parental pressure, though, ironically, Princeton was originally her first choice. But now that she’s here, she hates it and is genuinely unhappy. She’s filling out transfer applications, and her professors think that she should transfer too. It wasn’t that she wasn’t trying to be happy either, because she really was. Right now, I feel like she’s almost resigned to being unhappy, and I hope that I can help to change that.
As I was talking to R, I found that I could really identify with her and immediately felt like she was one of those friends I wish I had found earlier on. Within days, it became apparent that with time, she could probably be one of my closest friends here, and I think a big reason for that is because I could easily have been in her situation.
I always had the attitude that with time, friends will come - that the most meaningful friendships arise naturally, without conscious efforts. While that may be an antisocial mindset, I’ve found that it still holds true, even in college. Granted, it took a long time before it happened, but after sticking out months of unhappiness, I came out the other end with some people I could really call friends. Talking to R brought on two different realizations:
- I had not even noticed that things had gotten better, or that I could even consider myself happy here. I was so busy with work, and I just didn’t want to dwell on my unhappiness. I just stopped thinking about it and stuck it out. As I was talking to R, I thought to myself, why shouldn’t I encourage her to transfer? Why am I trying so hard to make her stay, when I wanted to leave in the first place? And I realized that it was because I was just like her, and that with time I had actually found the light at the end of the tunnel.
- Even if I have friends here, I’ve found that time is no qualification for the kind of connection two friends share. Sometimes, you just click with people. After getting to know R better, I almost began to question how close I really was with a lot of my other friends. I know this lesson seems to go against the overarching message of this post, but really, it goes to show that some of the best friendships arise naturally and will come to you if you wait.
I’m not going to come out and say that I’m super happy here. And I’m definitely not going to say that I like Princeton, because I still don’t. But what I can say is that I’ve been able to come to terms with it and make the most out of my situation. When life goes to shit, you just gotta hang in there, I guess. And now, I’m going to try to do for R what I wish someone had done for me from the very beginning: be a friend.
