You don’t need to be friends with everybody!
How many times do you find yourself worrying if someone likes you or not? Or about how many friends you have? Perhaps as you get older you start to worry less about these things, but as an eighteen-year-old starting university it will probably be one of the most important things that you think about.
Moving into halls at university it was crazy: everyone left their bedroom doors open, knocked on people’s doors for a chat, went out drinking with everybody they could on the first night, introduced themselves to as many people as they could… forgot half of their names by the next day….
During the first year of university I was friends with as many people as I could be in my block of halls and used to go out with them regularly. I stretched myself and burned the candle at both ends as often as I could to maintain relationships with these people. Then something changed and I met people that I actually had a connection with. My flatmates of the time had all decided to move in together the next year and hadn’t told me, and I was left with no housemates for the next year. I think found others in a similar boat, and I’m glad to say that these are the people who I will truly call my friends after we have all moved away.
At the time I didn’t necessarily think anything of it, but now when I look back I see that I was so busy trying to be friends with everybody that I wasn’t really that close to anybody.
What I have learnt is that it really doesn’t matter if you aren’t friends with everybody, it’s really much more worthwhile to focus your efforts on people who you truly enjoy being around and who have a real place in your life. If you do have loads of close friends then great, but if you are a bit of a loner like me then don’t worry about how many friends you have or if you lose contact with people and don’t miss them.
See: Things I have learnt at University
Tags: friends, growing up, halls, Life, loner, Personal, philosophy, popularity, realisations, relationships, thoughts, university
