A Whole New World

---

There is really a part of me that wants to go home. I want to go home to the friends I like, to Widener and the other places I know, and to the situations I’m comfortable with. I feel like freshman year you make initial friends and then spend time going through and adjusting your friends and relationships until you have a group and a way of doing things that you like by around the end of freshman year or beginning of sophomore year. And in sophomore year you settle into your routine and your friends and your life. I became very comfortable with the world I created for myself. I picked friends, clubs, classes, a new church, exercise, healthy eating, better stress management, etc. I miss my world terribly.
I am an adult. A young adult, but an adult. I have made a world for myself that I like through my choices and activities. I love my world. Why did I decide to evict myself when I had just built my home?! I had started to get comfortable and even decorate!! I thought it would be a really great learning and growing experience to push myself out of my comfort zones, but now I truly see why they’re called that! It was the world I was comfortable with. I’m not comfortable here! Everything is different and hard and now I’m not sure why I thought this would be a good idea. Why did I come here voluntarily - no, in fact, I fought to come here! - only to make myself sad and lonely?! What was I thinking?!?! I guess I had romanticized ideas about what it would be like. I never imagined I would have a hard time making friends - I never had before in my life. But I was hanging out with a group of people at first that liked to party all the time and eventually made me feel very unwelcome and were slightly mean to me. I’m alone a lot. I eat by myself and walk around by myself; I don’t really have friends that want to make plans to do things with me during breaks at school or after school. I don’t really have people to hang out with. So I have to start all over again. I’m trying to meet people who aren’t as ‘cool’ (not that ‘cool people’ was what I was going for in the beginning; it just so happened that those people ended up becoming that kind of group and I’ve never fit in with the ‘cool’ kids). I’m trying to make friends with people who would like to go out maybe once a week but prefer otherwise to hang out and stay in, chill, and just talk or watch a movie or something like that. I think it is getting a little bit better (God I hope!!)..I’ve met a few people that hopefully I can hang out with when we go to the Cote d’Azur this weekend. I’ve made some kind of temporary plans with people (‘let’s hang out again’, ‘let’s watch movies sometime’). It just makes all of the other things that aren’t going so well so much harder when I feel like I’m not really making good connections and friends here. Everyone is starting to click off into groups and I am all by myself a lot. It really sucks.
But even if I had made good friends here to start with I hate the idea that by coming here I am making myself start my little world all over again temporarily with all new people, in a foreign country, with a foreign language, and the added stress of a crazy homestay! I don’t know that I was thinking and I don’t know if it will get better. I think it will; I hope it will. Everyone says that it will but that is just what you say to someone - they don’t really know. I feel very alone here.

---