Guest Post: Boys, Friendships, and Knowing who You are by Harriet Alove

            I invited a close friend of mine to write a post about whatever she desired. Harriet Alove (pen name) reflects on boys and finding who she is while in college. 
------------------------------

            Much like Katherine since I have been at college I have noticed a lot of new different things. I am no longer coddled by the Jesuits, no more Kairos, no more of my sisters passing me in the hallways while I’m having a meltdown during class and having them sit and talk with me ‘till I feel better. Going to one of the largest state universities in the country has truly shell shocked me. Having ‘theology of the body’ as the most of a sex ed class I’ve had, to oddly having more knowledge about Myer’s Briggs types thanks to Mr. Cook’s junior theology. However, what has shocked me the most is how lost I have felt about myself. I’m no longer a swimmer, a good old Catholic girl going to Catholic school, and whatever false sense of feeling like I finally understood myself at the end of my senior year, completely gone.

            I blame (not that I should place blame) my own obsession with a boy my senior year. This boy I would spend all my time with, put all my energy into, and do just about anything to talk, text or see him. I cut out friends and didn’t spend time with my family. This boy and I were best friends, he’s the first person who I ever truly felt ‘got what I was all about.’ But the problem was our timing. I spent most of my senior year with him, talking about life, and death and where we’d run away together to. Listening to music and going on drives.  I slowly fell in love with this boy, but the problem was, he didn’t fall in love with me. He goes to a different college than I do on the other side of the country. Earlier in our friendship we talked about this, how we would facetime, snapchat, and text and everything would be okay. However in the pit of my stomach I knew this wouldn’t be true.

Side note I have almost a 6^th sense, I know how things will work out or what will happen in scenarios up to weeks before an event. Anything from my suitemate and I running into the boy from down the hall on our way to the trash to knowing whether or not I will be friends with someone years down the road.

The summer before college the boy I loved started to pull away, it was natural and probably for the best, but it still stung. I would cry to my friend from work, I was worried about missing him, about finding someone like him ever again, all very traumatic things for an eighteen year old who was has never ‘officially’ had a boyfriend. The week before I left a friend group of mine and I had a get together, an end to the season of our ongoing sitcom and the boy was there too.

 That night I told him how much he meant to me, how I loved him and was worried about not finding a friend like him again, to which he promised he loved me too in a different way and that we would continue to be friends. However afterwards my contact with him dwindled significantly. Only maintaining a snapchat streak, no response to my text message or a call, but being too afraid to be that girl so I stopped. To this day there is only one message I sent to him left not responded to and I realized it was time to move on.

In the past four months I often find myself lost in the playlists we had made for our long drives around Denver. Knowing that what I had with him will never be back, and I believed myself to be slowly getting over him. I was angry that I had wasted my time but on the other hand I wanted the memories to stay sweet so I never thought badly of my ‘wasted time’ and tried different ways to meet new people. I downloaded tinder to which I found the ravages of college males, pick up lines that had double meanings. And my innocent Catholic girl inside me was terrified. Was this what ‘Real boys’ are like? I met boys at parties and talked to lab partners and classmates, hoping I could make some sort of connection similar to a boy who could ‘get what I’m all about.’ The problem though is I don’t even get what I’m all about. I have this false hope that somewhere down the line I will be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Zooey Deschanel often finds herself playing. That there will be a guy who sweeps me off my feet and saves me. Not very feminist of me but it’s the simple dream of mine since I was ten years old.

I have made great friends at my college. A farm girl from eastern Montana who’s chased her dreams to play a D1 sport at a Pac12 school. A boy from Tennessee who’s incredibly helped my transition from catholic school girl to a state college kid. A girl from Wyoming who introduced me to Blue Mountain State and has grieved with me over our failing calculus grades. These friends I have told about my senior year love and they have shared similar stories. I’ve come to realize this feeling of being “Lost” is almost common between all college students. I don’t necessarily know if I belong in the state of my college, or if I belong at home in Denver. Everything is different in both places and I’m often confused which version of myself I truly am.

This thanksgiving break has provided me with nearly all the answers I was looking for. My dad’s been incredibly understanding of my failing calculus grade. My mom helps me understand how I need to learn to love myself before looking for a guy who poetically ‘gets what I’m all about’ and actually need to go work out rather than lay in my room and be lazy. As for my senior love, nearly everything clicked just this past weekend. Our friend group planned on meeting for breakfast and a friendsgiving this past Saturday. I picked up one of our friends so I wasn’t showing up alone and I not so calmly walked into the restaurant. I saw him for the first time in 3 months, he gave me a hug and we carried on as usual. It didn’t feel weird or forced, and our conversation circled around our new college experiences. As I talked to him I noticed something different. As a person I see myself as yellow, or at least on the outside. Bubbly, outgoing, often sunshine-y and I had fallen in love with a boy who was red. He was poetic and artsy. Our yellow and red melded well to be who we were our senior year. But as we talked he wasn’t red anymore. He was shades of black and white, someone new I didn’t necessarily know, not the boy that I was in love with. Which both made things so much easier, but made the nostalgia so much more bittersweet. It felt like a new chapter in our friendship where everything was almost going to be more okay than they were before.  

So as I fly back today, I’m looking at my situation differently, rather than a sorry little Catholic school girl at a huge university who’s more lost than ever, but to view it as truly an adventure.