So around this time last week, I rediscovered my love affair with words and telling stories. In those first couple posts back, I apparently alarmed several people and just wanted to take a few minutes to wax poetic about the current era of my life to make it up to them.

I’ve said it once and I will continue to defend this position until the end of time, but they say that you should write about what you know. As a fairly inexperienced college student, the things that I know about are rather limited. Beyond banalities like books, television, and movies (which in contexts outside of this I find exciting, as I consistently make evident), the two things I genuinely know about are myself and my friends. And, as everyone also knows, I hate talking about myself. So let me take a moment to address all of them.

Making friends is not something that comes naturally to me. I am an introvert at heart, content to sit alone in a world of my own creation and am frequently found traipsing through others’ written words. The tight-knit group of individuals that I left behind at the end of high school made my desire to make friends at college a little less instinctual than it probably should have been. However, once that tight-knit group disbanded this past summer, I had some time to think about all the people I’ve met at college over the past two years and how much they do, in fact, mean to me.

Though I have made the mistake of putting groups of people on a pedestal before, I have no problem saying that my friends on this Bluff they- well, they’re everything. And do you know why they’re everything? Because I hand-picked them and, in turn, they hand-picked me.

Making friends at college is a lot different than making friends in any other stage of life. In elementary school, you mostly make friends because of simplicities like sharing crayons or playing together at recess. These friendships generally follow through to high school. Therefore, college is one of the first times that our decisions in who we become friends with actually have to do with common interests and developed characteristics, rather than remembering who was nice to us at nap time.

I am not the easiest person to get along with, nor is it easy for me to make friends. Because I am reserved and would much rather play “the witness,” I didn’t immediately make any efforts to bond with the people in my dorm or classes. However, through a persistent effort on both parts, the initial reservations that I had have completely evaporated. The people in the picture above are better than I could have imagined for any era of my life. They are intelligent, sarcastic, humorous, good people.

Make no mistake- they are not perfect. They say hurtful things, have short tempers, and produce more sass than any group anywhere else in this world. But in some twisted way, this dynamic works for us. It is perfect in its imperfections. They are the kind of people who will buy you a Rachel Berry graduation card just to remind you that, though you haven’t graduated recently, you are a star. The kind of people who form a fan club for your dog. The kind of people who post pictures of baby animals on each other’s Facebooks. The kind of people who read your stupid blog and are concerned when you’re not acting like yourself.

We all met each other at fascinating times in our lives, where we stood at the cusp of leaving home behind and looking forward to a terrifying and unknown future. These vulnerabilities tied us to one another in a weird bond that I don’t think I can explain. They saw me when I didn’t want to be seen, and in turn, I hope that I continually provide some kind of dynamic in their lives that they appreciate just as much.

I am finally realizing that college is not all about grades or clubs. It isn’t necessarily about the degrees or the classes.

More so, it is about discovering who we were all meant to be. We’ll fight and we’ll laugh, but as long as we do those things together, we’ll be learning something about what we want in life.

This Bluff is such a wonderful support system and I can’t believe I even thought about leaving it. Yes, I am proud of my grades and my accomplishments- the things that come naturally to me.

But my greatest college victories to date are all of them.