Ever since I was a young girl, all I’ve ever heard is how college life is the life.
It’s the time to join clubs, make friends and experience life. College, to me, was going to be an amped up version of High School Musical.
The reality? Way different.
My life since 2014 has basically consisted of three things: Netflix, sleep and sleeping with Netflix on in the background. I am proudly one of the laziest people I know.
Now I know not everyone is like this, I’ve heard the party stories. I’ve seen the Instagram pictures. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve come to love being an introvert.
From kindergarten through high school my teachers would call me a social butterfly. I swear sometimes they called me this more than they called me by my own name. I was the definition of extrovert. What changed?
After deciding to take a year before putting myself through another four years of schooling, I fell in love with doing nothing. I had no job, my friends were in Grand Rapids and every day was just Grey’s Anatomy, a box of pizza rolls and me. It was AWESOME.
Unfortunately, a year is only so long and I ended up back at school where I thought I belonged. But when I got here, all I felt was out of place.
I remember getting to my first class and sitting in the back and watching everybody talk around me. I didn’t feel that I was able to just jump into any conversation because everybody was already paired off with friends.
I felt even more awkward just sitting and staring at people. I was no longer confident enough to be an extrovert or comfortable enough to be an introvert and so I was stuck for that whole first year.
I tried to go back to my old ways. I made a couple of friends and we went to football games and drove around adventurous Big Rapids. We did the college life and all I felt was uncomfortable.
This wasn’t me anymore. But every time I found myself sitting in my room watching television, I felt that I was missing the college experience.
I know when somebody calls you an introvert it sounds like some horrible diagnosis, like they’re calling you out for being boring. Maybe they are, but don’t ever think that being introverted labels you as weird.
It’s perfectly normal and okay to feel comfortable with the life you have. Just because college is portrayed in movies as this wild, crazy adventure, doesn’t mean it has to be. At least not in the sense that they intend it too.
College changes people. You aren’t the same person you were your freshman year in high school. This is a new year, new semester and clean slate.
The movies might be wrong about how everyone parties hardcore all the time. But they aren’t wrong about how this is the time to figure out who you are or what you want to be.
For the record, I am not saying go ahead and commit to the hermit life without first trying something.
Go to a game. Talk to someone in your class. Get involved at least once in college. Why? Just to say that you did.
It took me three years to find a happy medium in my college life, and I didn’t find it by showing up at school and sitting around all day. I got up. I went out. I discovered what worked for me and what I could do without.
Luckily, what worked ended up being me in a pair of slippers and going to sleep at a reasonable time.
So what do you do when your friends call you introverted? Own it.
Flaunt it in their faces that you are completely satisfied with sitting at home in pajamas while they feel the need to always be on-the-go and doing something.
I am a proud introvert.
I think as long as you are proud of who you are, you can’t go wrong. Unless you are one of those people that enjoys taking 8 a.m. classes. Because I mean, come on, people.