I start this chapter off with an inquiry. Can one have too many friends? As someone who naturally keeps their circle small, this question hasn’t ever really crossed my mind. I certainly didn’t think about it when I was trying to befriend every friendly face I came across at school. But when I made the friends who would eventually stick with me that first semester, I learned that friendship comes with persistence. I would make the effort to talk to them everyday after class, even if it was about the most trivial things, showing not only an interest in them but that I cared to seek them out. It was like watering a flower every day, and as time passed that flower bloomed into a great friendship. But much like the fauna outside of this metaphor, if left unattended for too long, a flower will begin to wilt until ultimately, it is left without any petals and its stem that once stood tall and firm can be shoved over with a gentle swaying of the breeze. I was nurturing the new, vibrant flowers in the forefront of my garden of friendships, wanting them to reach the heights of those who came before them. But as they grew, they obscured my sight of those very flowers in the back. As they basked in the shadows of their successors, their stems slowly leaned to the left and their petals grew wrinkly, all while I remained blissfully unaware, blind to their deteriorating states.

 
I mentioned before that I took a different route from my high school peers and went to a university outside of my home state. And I’ve mentioned more times than I can recall that I was laser-focused on ensuring that I would not be lonely without them. Yet another thing I failed to consider in that endeavor, is not only how to maintain the friendships I’d make, but how to keep the ones I’d leave behind. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they dropped like flies, the flowers with unsteady roots dying first, and the stronger ones holding out until the very end of their lifespan. Some of these freshly failed friendships were a blessing in disguise, as the distance allowed me to slowly, but surely, cease contact with the people who I fully intended to keep as a high school memory. Not everyone is meant to follow you until the end of your journey in life, and that’s more than okay. Some people are meant to be in certain phases of your life, but as you change and grow, you may not find a place where they fit nicely anymore. I will restate that friendships form most strongly when rooted in convenience and consistency. If I’m no longer seeing someone every day, that immediately shatters this foundation, and if our friendship isn’t strong enough to withhold it, it’ll simply fade away. In all honesty, this is one of the healthiest ways to end friendships. If you think about them as plants, they are weeds taking up space in your garden and when you nip them in the bud and get them out, everything looks a lot better. As Psych Central quotes, “Many friendships dissolve naturally over time, as you grow up and grow apart. Sometimes, letting go of a friend who is no longer a good fit for you can actually improve your quality of life.” So to answer my initial question, you must envision your garden of friendship. Are there lots of weeds? Dried and browning stems? Falling petals? If so, drifting apart may be for the better.

By Tiana Gregg

Tiana is a rising junior at NYU majoring in English and minoring in Art History. She spends her days reading, writing, listening to music, and indulging in just about every hobby (except sports!) you can think of to fill her time. You will never find her idling.

For over 20 years, the Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC,  from the East Side to Greenwich Village. Along with inspiration, the company offers students a special coupon booklet and the Official Student Guide, which encourages them to discover new places in the city and save money on food, clothing, and services.  

At the Campus Clipper, not only do we help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create wonderful e-books, we give them a platform to teach others. Check our website for more student savings and watch our YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during the Welcome Week of 2015.

I, along with anyone who has attended any university, know that the people you meet during that first week will not be amongst the faces you see when you walk down the aisle at your wedding. If you are lucky, you may see them in passing down the street, and if you are even luckier, a smile or familiar gaze may be exchanged between you two. Alas, if you are like the majority of us, these things won’t ever happen to you, and as sad as it may sound, it is simply one of many blips that occur in the journey that is college. In the first week of school, I found myself making introductions with anyone that would cross my path, regardless of our compatibility or even shared hobbies. “Oh you like Stephen King? I saw the trailer for It once!” I was securing companionships to avoid being lost and lonely in the sea of hundreds of unfamiliar faces filled with passion and strong opinions that made up Manhattan. All for the fruits of my labor to disappear within the next couple of days. 

It was startling when the group chat of ten people I was in slowly fizzled out, and plans stopped being made. It was easy to spend hours dedicated to wondering what went wrong. How had I made and kept friends in all the years prior to this? Although college is a very unique experience, it is not alien to everything you have ever experienced before it. In high school, one is shoved into a cramped building with at least one hundred other students, in your graduating class alone, and something akin to natural selection takes place. You gravitate like magnets to those like yourself and befriend the faces you see every day. The remainder of those around you are plucked out from the social pool, and become mere backdrops to the place that becomes the center of your universe. Julie, who sits next to you in algebra every morning is more likely to become your friend than Alan, who is on the opposite side of the building taking science classes the same morning. Forced proximity breeds the most intimate of relationships, and psychology supports this. A Very Well Mind article states, “In social psychology, the proximity principle suggests that people closer together in a physical environment are more likely to form a relationship than those farther away. ”(Vinney) This boils down to the simple concept of convenience. It is far easier to reach out to the person you sit next to in your 8 am class than the person you met a week ago at some random event who lives in a dorm on the other side of campus. You have no motive to seek the latter individual out, not because of anything personal, but because you do not know them, thus making any efforts to go see them become tedious and unnecessary, and you eventually give up on any possible prospect of friendship. The same thing can occur even when you love someone, which is why many shy away from the idea of long-distance relationships. Closeness is crucial to most relationships, and when you have one that is burdened by physical distance, the main priority is usually to minimize that distance as soon as possible. This is how I realized I could not force a friendship with those who were slipping from my grasp.

By Tiana Gregg

Tiana is a rising junior at NYU majoring in English and minoring in Art History. She spends her days reading, writing, listening to music, and indulging in just about every hobby (except sports!) you can think of to fill her time. You will never find her idling.

For over 20 years, the Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC,  from the East Side to Greenwich Village. Along with inspiration, the company offers students a special coupon booklet and the Official Student Guide, which encourages them to discover new places in the city and save money on food, clothing, and services.  

At the Campus Clipper, not only do we help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create wonderful e-books, we give them a platform to teach others. Check our website for more student savings and watch our YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during the Welcome Week of 2015.

Although I did not cry at graduation, I cried a lot when I finally arrived at the place that would shape the next four years of my life. The first wave of tears came when my mom and sister bid me farewell, the floodgates opening soon after the last box of my clothes arrived safely in my room. All the ones that escaped my tear ducts afterward would bloom from seeds of insecurity and uncertainty. I finally had what felt like the world at my fingertips. But what to do with it? I will admit after seeing my roommate, who I had barely uttered a word to, take off the next morning while I was still glued to my stuffed animal-adorned bed, I was consumed by envy of her confidence and independence, and startled by the apparent lack of my own. I had already felt as though I was the turtle in the race of socialization. I was so focused on making it to university, that now that I was here, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. The friends I had back home all had each other, as they went to the state school more than half our high school class would be attending. I refused to let wallowing in my self-pity become an option though, and so I found myself gearing up for the day, not knowing where I was headed, but letting my footsteps lead me out the door anyway.

Instead of heading to the bookstore or the library when I stepped out into the salty, brisk wind of New York autumn, I forced myself over to a dining hall where I would meet my first round of prospective friends. In retrospect who could blame me? Since I could remember, American media had been spoon-feeding me tales of wild parties, new romantic partners every week, and substances I could barely wrap my tongue around pronouncing. My university itself was selling the slogan, ‘This is the best four years of your life!’ (I definitely haven’t heard that before) to students, reminding us at every turn that we’d never know if our soulmate would be lurking at the fifth free pizza event of the week. Despite having been proven wrong about this four-year bonanza before, I ashamedly fell for it again. I fell into step with the often-time robotic script of asking everyone I crossed paths with, “What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s your major?” I was maybe a little too optimistic, and too convinced that I would in fact meet my future spouse at the speed dating event at the dorm a twenty-minute walk from me. I collected Instagram usernames for sport, and I still have numbers on my phone that have never been contacted, and whose names I no longer recognize. It felt as though if I did not make friends that week, the window for all the relationships that awaited me for the next four years would close its doors and remain shut for the rest of my college career. Overdramatic yes, but it was the gospel I preached and practiced. Birds of a feather flock together, and if you had not found people to latch on to during that first week, you could kiss your social life goodbye. At the end of it all, I emerged victorious in my endeavor and had multiple individuals I felt I could call friends, despite knowing them for a measly couple of days. I would soon discover that although I survived the battle, there was a greater war to come.

By Tiana Gregg

Tiana is a rising junior at NYU majoring in English and minoring in Art History. She spends her days reading, writing, listening to music, and indulging in just about every hobby (except sports!) you can think of to fill her time. You will never find her idling.

For over 20 years, the Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC,  from the East Side to Greenwich Village. Along with inspiration, the company offers students a special coupon booklet and the Official Student Guide, which encourages them to discover new places in the city and save money on food, clothing, and services.  

At the Campus Clipper, not only do we help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create wonderful e-books, we give them a platform to teach others. Check our website for more student savings and watch our YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during the Welcome Week of 2015.

In the weeks leading up to my high school graduation, I swore up and down to anyone who would listen that I would be bawling like a baby upon hearing the first name hesitantly called out by our principal. I cried at the sound of the bell ringing signaling our last day of school, I wailed tears of misery the last time I saw my best friend, and I almost ruined my graduation photos with the tear tracks drying up crustily on my foundation-patted cheeks. The actual ceremony felt like a blur, a simple hour spent listening to names be called that I’d never hear uttered again, and peering into the crowd in the stands for faces I recognized. I remember determinedly weaving through bodies in a crowd in its aftermath, in search of the familiar faces of my friends and family. As we all eventually found our way to each other, I took in their various expressions, some delirious with joy, some drowning in relief, and some helplessly devastated. One face in particular was sobbing out uncontrollably, and as I teased her for the state she was in she hid her face in the crook of her gown-clad elbow and blubbered out through a mess of snot and tears, “Why aren’t you crying?”

Of course, I had been asking myself the same question since we took our seats in front of the podium.  I know I have the bad human habit of looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, romanticizing the worst of times, and yearning for a me that no longer exists. High school is no exception, and I have plenty of good memories from that period of my life, but my graduation is one event my mind has not been able to sugarcoat. The immediate response that rang through my head was, ‘Well, because I hated it here’. Although it does feel like an overstatement to say that I hated my high school, it was indeed a word I threw around a lot in association with the establishment. In most instances, it was fueled by teenage angst, and out of spite for the often ridiculous rules we were bound by inside its steadily chipping blue-painted walls. But at other, more desperate times, it was shouted out of sheer frustration from the mouth of my 16-year-old self in response to my parent’s inquiries, crushed by a pressure that was always looming over my head. To hate something is to care, and I cared so much about things that have become relatively trivial to me now, but that seemed to be equivalent to the weight of the world a mere two years ago. I always felt like I was embedded in a crisis, whether it was if my stomach looked flat enough to wear the new crop top I bought, the number displayed in my Instagram followers, or finding a steady group to sit with at lunch. One building had been the center of my universe for nearly half a decade, and in one moment, all of the things I nursed so carefully in my mind for years seemingly dissipated, and it was all over. At that moment I realized just how small me and my worries were, as they fell into another drop into the bucket that is life. In my smallness, the world felt overwhelmingly bigger, and through me rushed a feeling I haven’t the words to explain. So I smiled sheepishly at my friend and responded with an bashful, “I don’t know”.

By Tiana Gregg

Tiana is a rising junior at NYU majoring in English and minoring in Art History. She spends her days reading, writing, listening to music, and indulging in just about every hobby (except sports!) you can think of to fill her time. You will never find her idling.

For over 20 years, the Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC,  from the East Side to Greenwich Village. Along with inspiration, the company offers students a special coupon booklet and the Official Student Guide, which encourages them to discover new places in the city and save money on food, clothing, and services.  

At the Campus Clipper, not only do we help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create wonderful e-books, we give them a platform to teach others. Check our website for more student savings and watch our YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during the Welcome Week of 2015.