People are put in our pathways for a reason. I learn this lesson more and more every day, especially after I entered my first year of college two years ago. Now this was a new arena for me, coming from a very sheltered, very conservative background, and I was so excited for the change. College was the place for me to let my hair down and show the world what I was made of, or at least that was how I imagined it. This was the time for me to meet new people, learn my lessons, and truly take advantage of life in a way that gave me the experiences I craved.
Now in my school, the dorms are all co-ed, and there are only two floors in the entire university reserved for single-sexes, and I bet you can guess which floor I ended up on. At first, I was infuriated. Here everyone was experiencing the true joys of college life, like seeing the boy walk by in a towel, and I was stuck with these girls who I imagined as weird lepers who did not have a modicum of interest in joining the lot of us “normal” people. Boy was I wrong.
When I arrived, I got to meet all the girls. I look around, each face blending into the next: each face promising to be weirder than the next, blander the next. I took it in stride. I knew that my time would be best spent elsewhere with people who were more like me or the me that I so badly wanted to be. And of course in the nature of the first weeks of school, I moved from group to group, where I finally landed in the crowd that all my life I wanted to fit into.
I made it work, returning week after week, day after day, and each day an emptiness settled into my chest; each visit, a piece of me went missing, until I realized that this was no way to live. I knew I needed a change, but the only way to execute this change was to not leave my room. As I spent more time in my room, I had time to cultivate relationships with the girls on my floor that I had once shunned and claimed as strange, and I realized that I had more in common with them than I had even cared to admit. This was a group of girls that I could truly be myself with, a group that I did not feel it was necessary to put on a show, a character that I figured as appropriate for the situation. These were the girls that I was able to develop who I was, so that when someone asked who I was, I had at least an idea.
This is not the most ideal situation for a person to be indoctrinated into college – by a bunch of girls who, just by the idea of a single-sex floor, seem to not have a grasp on reality – however these girls were the very reason that I was able to grasp the reality of who I was. These girls were put in my path way not to stunt my growth or to hinder what I could be, but rather for the purpose of enhancing and pushing me towards who I really was, who I really am. Sometimes we are so quick to dismiss people whose sheer idea seems inconsistent with whom we think we are, but these people that we dismiss could very well be the door to who we really are. Open your eyes to the people that are so blatantly there, they see you when you wake up, and when you go to bed. These people could very well be the ones who you call your true friend in the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment