I realize now that I never really fit in back home to begin with, but I am holding on to the few real connections I do have there. Upon a lot of self-reflection, I realize now that being stuck between these two worlds doesn't have to be a bad thing, a thing to lament.

The university's environment and culture was not built for people like me, and that would be something I would have to confront and adapt to in the coming years. I felt like an outsider, and I understood that it was the way things were going to be. I did have friends that first year, that I actually did stuff with, but as time went on, those friendships disappeared, and once again I was left alone, trying to find a place where I belonged.

That first year, I was constantly surrounded by people, but I still felt very alone, because my life experiences could not relate to the life experiences of the people around me, and when you can't find things in common with the people around you, it's hard to build true, lasting friendships. Attending an expensive private university, I should have anticipated that it would be difficult to find people to relate to, to find a niche in which I belonged, but the first year, I held on to my rose-colored glasses and thought that it could only go up from there. Though I always carried the mindset that I would make it out of that town and finally become the person I wanted to be and start a new life, it's hard to actually carry that out when you feel so alone. I came from a single-parent household with a low socio-economic status, from a school district that really didn't prepare me for the rigor of my college's coursework (I had so many incredible teachers, but I think mentally I wasn't prepared for the academic rigor), from a background filled with traumas that I tried to bury, from a family whose ties were weak, from an entirely different world and state of being. But early on, I knew that adjusting to this new would would be difficult.

Caught two worlds i.c.u.