For anyone wondering, no: the questions don’t stop.
“How did you know Georgetown was the one?”
“Is it just the perfect fit?”
“Are you so happy?”
The first time I ever answered that question honestly was the fall of my junior year.
That November evening, I was crouched outside on one of the Vil-A benches, heaving from my third panic attack that day (something I hadn’t experienced before college), on the phone with my dad.
“You don’t…seem happy,” he carefully said.
Ask anyone in my Georgetown orbit, and they wouldn’t tell you I was miserable. A little on edge, sure, but overall, solid. I was part of an a cappella group that allowed me to sing and came with a “built-in” family. I was heading the Voices section, building out my passion for journalism. I did well in class, found a major I loved to rant about, and got into the D.C. running community.
But every semester, I would come home to my best friend Frances and swear, “This next one is gonna be it.” Still, something was always off.
I liked the drive of Georgetown on paper, but found the ladder-climbing, coded corporate speak rendered me “soft” as someone often described as “too earnest.” I began to speak less about the things I cared about. My friends from back home leaned in, believing the hard stuff made us closer. I struggled to find that support at Georgetown.
I met mean people, people who mangled my perception of trust, and settled for friends I didn’t even believe liked me, just for the stability. I felt painstakingly aware of my personality to the point where I began to dissociate from myself, at the very time I was supposed to be discovering it.
This is not an effort to scare you away from Georgetown as you arrive. The symptoms were partially circumstantial, but that doesn’t make Georgetown the only diagnosis. I was also reeling from some deep-set mental health and family issues that had been taking root for quite some time.
Regardless of the reason, sometimes the place you wind up in just doesn’t mesh well with all of you. The discomfort may only start after a long while, or persist your entire time here. Sometimes, it never truly clicks. And that is okay.
Georgetown just hasn’t quite meshed with all of me. And it feels really great to say that.
I went abroad to Scotland this past spring, following one of my toughest semesters. However, despite early-on tribulations, the semester ended with me feeling the most “stable” I had been at this school.
So, uprooting my entire life for a semester was naturally nerve-wracking. On my first day there, I met two girls, Kayla and Caroline, from the University of Pennsylvania, and we frantically made a group chat to secure some sense of friendship for the semester.
These girls are now two of my closest friends, and it wasn’t just because we were basically living a whole-semester bender (although that was great). It was the fact that I could whole-belly laugh with them, share inside jokes that felt years in the making, support each other in ugly moments, and most of all, be honest. In the sticky corners of Budapest ruin bars or the cold rocks on the St. Andrews West Sands, we sought to know each other better than we knew ourselves—our inner worlds flourished.
When we talked about our respective schools, it was difficult to dance around our true feelings. We were all somewhat unsatisfied, ultimately reporting a general lack of connection. But through our conversations, we slowly gained the confidence to not settle, but instead, embrace the lack and want more.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that if you feel like it should be better or at least different, it certainly can.
Some of that just means waiting: college isn’t forever, and your world will only continue to expand. But another, more valuable part of it is not being afraid to seek out something better, even if it means creating discomfort for yourself.
I wasn’t sure how I would transition back into Georgetown. I remember Kayla and I worrying that our happiness was just a product of being able to jet off to a new city at any moment. But what we really gained was an openness to spontaneity. Because our time was so temporary, we had the freedom to seek out new experiences without worrying about how they would fit into the bigger picture.
When I got back for the summer, I decided to invite the unexpected.
I reconnected with the friend crushes I always wished I saw more often, but never actually made the effort to. Those could be my close friends, I realized, even if they didn’t make up a perfect group in my head.
I also wasn’t afraid to branch out of Georgetown, whether that meant working at Pacers Running with the best coworkers ever, or reconnecting with graduated friends.
And after years of searching for someone just like her, I realized that Frances really just was one of a kind.
College is the beginning of your adult self, someone who is constantly shifting, morphing, unraveling, and coming together; it’s only natural that the world around you does the same. Things don’t have to feel perfect.
I’m giving this advice as much for you as I am for myself. I’m not sure how it’s going to go, but in some ways, I’m happy that even in my last year here, I don’t have it fully figured out yet. That means there’s only more love, joy, and connection out there to discover.
