College is a great place to discover who the adult version of yourself will be. Any given campus will have an array of personality types and, depending on your morals, they can be good or bad influences. On so many occasions, it’s important to understand the red flags in friendships so you don't fall into a crowd of people who don’t align with your self-beliefs.
In the classroom, walking to Patriot, the library, and anywhere you go on campus, you're bound to run into someone you've seen or know. Even on the Mount's small campus, it’s easy to run into every personality type. However you choose to live your life, it's important that the people you associate with live in a way similar to you. It's important to surround yourself with people who bring you up and help you grow as an individual.
There’s an old saying that people come into our lives for a reason and leave like a season. This means not every friendship you make in college, or even life in general, is supposed to last forever. If it's from growing distant, a fallout, or simply not being compatible, some friendships are temporary, providing something for your life that you needed at a specific time.
In my friend group at college, someone we all grew close with these last 4 years has been dealing with a lot of trauma from their past. While we supported and were there for this person, it was hard for them to not continuously take out frustrations and insecurities on us because we were the people they were around. Eventually, as frustrations grew, some of the group found themselves growing tired of the arguments we would have, and after many attempts to help, it clear that it was time to go in a different direction.
It is great for people to seek help to work through their past experiences, and through that help, there should eventually be growth. What I noticed in this particular situation though was that it wasn't good for our friend to take out their past on us, the people who were trying to support them in this struggle, and it wasn't fair for us to feel trapped in a never-ending cycle of arguments. Put bluntly, there wasn't much growth yet. Some friendships that end have to be seen as a life lesson of knowing who you want to surround yourself with in the future. If you feel like someone you're close with on-campus isn't treating you with the same respect you show them, it may be worth having that conversation with them about what's going on or possibly going your separate ways.
Especially on campus, we’re only here for 4 years before beginning another chapter in our lives, so you must try to enjoy as much of that as possible. You earned your way into college, you earned your scholarship, and for a lot of students, you and your family are paying good money for you to further your education and grow in the same process. Self-love is never selfish.
