My first defining memory of being a Binghamton University student is of calling my mom at 2 a.m., sobbing uncontrollably. The kind of crying I did that night was the kind of crying I tend to reserve for funerals and the final scene in “Titanic.” It was ugly.
I was crying because I was homesick; I missed my mom and my cat and the familiarity of the town I grew up in, regardless of how much I disliked it. I was crying because it was cold and I was in Binghamton, which is reason enough to cry any winter day here. Beyond this surface discomfort, though, I was crying because I was alone with myself for the first time in my life.
I’ve written before in Pipe Dream about my lifelong struggle with depression and anxiety, but there had always been distractions around me when I lived at home. The familiar is a banal comfort, even on the worst days. Even on the nights I ended up calling a suicide hotline, there were saved episodes of “Jeopardy!” in the DVR for my mom and me to watch. There was always something to keep me out of the dark places in my head.
When I got to BU, I left all familiarity and comfort behind. I had a hard time making friends. I hated everyone around me for daring to be happy, hated how they were worthy of love when I so clearly was not. I hated their smiles and their laughs and their casual affection because I hated myself. I was lost. I didn’t go to class much that semester, and I was hospitalized for the fourth time in as many years when I went home for summer break.
The hardest thing you will do in college has nothing to do with the classes you take or the friends you make. The hardest thing you will do in college is learn how to be alone. I cannot reiterate this enough, however; learning how to be alone is also the most rewarding thing you will do in college. It’s hard and frightening, and even being completely comfortable in your own skin does not exempt your from flights of overwhelming grief. But you have no control over anything in this world except your own conduct – you cannot control your asshole professors or the idiots on your dorm floor, and you can’t make anyone like you, no matter how hard you try.
You can, however, learn to like yourself. You can learn to enjoy taking yourself out to dinner, and sitting in dark movie theaters with your feet up on the seat in front of you all by yourself. You can learn to enjoy the blissful peace of sitting on a bench with the sun on your face. Even if you have to fake it until you make it, you can do it. I know how tempting it is to numb every ounce of pain you feel, be it with drugs or alcohol or an addiction to buying combat boots. Believe me, the void never goes away. Even when things are going well, you are going to have to deal with the festering sores of trauma. But trying to numb yourself will only make you sicker. I know it’s hard. I know what the mental feedback loop of past traumas is like. But I also know that shutting down won’t get me anywhere. I have shit to do. I have a life to live.
To all the new freshmen and transfer students, it’s OK if you’re lost. It’s OK if you can’t make friends just yet. It’s OK if you cry every day. This is new and hard and it takes some adjustment. But in the meantime, you can hang out with yourself. You can have fun in the solitude. Take heart: for a long time I thought that I would be alone in college until the day I graduated, that I would just be here for a while and move on. I was wrong; the amount of love I have in my life now is overwhelming and indescribable, and the friendships I have here at BU bring me endless joy. And I have that level of love in my life because I accept my friends’ love. I let them in, because I’m finally comfortable enough with myself to let people see me as I am. I’m OK with myself. You can be OK with yourself too.