I’ve never been good with change; in fact, it terrifies me. More specifically, I’ve never been good with letting people go. Throughout orientation week at Hopkins, I would wake up in my dorm wishing I could go back to my childhood bedroom and listen to my parents’ voices drifting in from the living room. Even the thought of this was enough to make me burst into tears; I would FaceTime my mom telling her that I wanted to go home and had picked the wrong college. Later on in the day, I would incessantly text my best friend that I missed her and didn’t connect with anyone at Hopkins. “Did you really try to talk to anyone?” she would ask. I'd respond with a quick “Yes!” even though the truth was no.
The truth was, I would make small talk with several people and initiate meaningless conversations, sometimes in the sandwich line at FFC or while walking from one lecture hall to another, but I never fully opened myself up to form new friendships. Deep down, I was afraid of letting go of my best friends back home, though I didn’t realize it at the time. My entire first semester at Hopkins, I would walk through campus like a shell of a person who felt as though I had left my real self back in Miami. When I could finally call my best friends from home at the end of the day, it was as if I found that missing part of myself again, and, suddenly, everything felt okay. I always found comfort in knowing that I had already found my people back in high school — the two girls who were my rocks and would remain at my side for life.
The only problem with this philosophy was that it was built on the assumption that my friends back home felt the same way. This mantra came crashing down when I found out they were having the time of their lives together at college while I wasn’t. They were building their own college friend group while I had been feeling more alone than ever.
With all of this, I found myself adrift; I no longer knew who I was without them. Throughout the spring, my jokes about transferring to my friends’ college in Florida grew more serious with each passing day to the point where I started drafting my application and counted the days until spring break when I would be back in Miami with my best friends. Everything would surely go back to normal then. Right?
Everything took a turn when I saw the two girls, who had helped build much of who I was, constructing a life separate from me. When I finally got home for spring break, I struggled to grasp their inside jokes, didn’t recognize any of their campus celebrities and found myself saying, “What? Oh no, you didn’t tell me about that” far too many times. The two girls I had once fit with like missing pieces of a puzzle suddenly became parts of a completely different picture, one that I didn’t know how to fit myself into.
Deep down, I knew that we were growing apart, but I defined so much of myself based on them and their friendship that I did everything in my power to try and prevent that. My efforts to restore our friendship to its former glory were in vain.
A few months later, during summer break, the reality set in: My best friends and I had completely stopped talking. My worst nightmare had effectively come true. But, to my surprise, once we had gone our separate ways, the world didn’t end. Instead, it felt like it was just beginning. I started to realize that I had invested so much of my middle- and high-school years into shaping my identity around my closest friends that I had neglected to discover who Alyssa truly was. I spent the remainder of my summer not looking for a way back to them but, rather, a way back to myself.
While I was beginning to get used to life without them, I was also learning who I was. In some ways, going our separate ways allowed me to spend more time with myself. In my journal, I began to write everything I felt or anything I just wanted to get down on paper. Within just a few short weeks, I had filled the pages and learned more about myself than I had in the past few years. I began to find out who Alyssa alone was.
I once thought the feeling of anxiety and fear of losing my friends would never go away. But now, I wake up content with the life and friends surrounding me, knowing that, no matter who comes and goes, it will never change who I am. I guess you could say that letting go of my two best friends was once my worst nightmare, but it turned out to be the best thing that could’ve happened to me.
Alyssa Gonzalez is a sophomore from Miami, Fla. studying International Studies and Political Science with a minor in Economics.
