Every Monday morning, I wake up early to make it to my 8:30 a.m. class — one I was forced to take as a result of the upperclassmen who claimed spots in every Introduction to Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies class past 10 a.m. Walking through the crisp morning air, Elliot Smith, Slowdive, or an equally depressing artist blasts through my headphones. My Beats come off when class starts. But, the minute my professor says the class is over, the headphones cling to my ears once again. 

When I envisioned my first months of college, it wasn’t exactly like this. Don’t get me wrong, I have friends at WashU who I really like. Yet, that doesn’t free me from the feeling that I haven’t found where I belong yet, and that my home is still 2,000 miles away, where most of my best friends remain.

In my experience, the vast majority of media representations of your first year of college are a fantasy. I haven’t found my passion and community through a cappella like Beca in Pitch Perfect, nor have I invented the next tech empire like Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (I’ll leave that to the McKelvey students). Instead, my first months of college have been underwhelming.

Saying goodbye to my parents before Bear Beginnings was harder than I thought it would be. I wasn’t the type of kid who got homesick easily. In fact, I sought out school and summer programs that got me away from home. I yearned for a new environment and applied to mostly out-of-state colleges. Before leaving for St. Louis, my parents sat me down. “You can’t just not call us, Sylvie,” my dad explained. My mom made me promise that I’d at least text updates once a day. Let’s just say that during my two-week road trip to Seattle earlier last summer, I had forgotten the part where I had to actually tell my parents what I was doing. Yet, when I arrived at WashU and actually had to face the reality of permanently living away from them, I couldn’t control the on-and-off tears that led up to the final pre-college goodbye.

Living in a completely new environment has made me realize all of the little things that I loved at home, from the Bay Area fog to my mom’s homemade pesto. Although I’ve enjoyed experiencing a new city and getting to live on an incredibly beautiful campus, it feels like I’m walking through a TV set. I feel detached and uncomfortable, constantly hoping I’ll wake up back in my bed at home one morning.

Almost every person I spoke to before college told me a variation of the same concept: you will meet your best friends in college, you meet so many amazing people in college, et cetera. It’s true — there are many cool people at WashU, and I love the friends that I eat with in BD and do homework with every night in the common room. Yet, nothing feels the same as being able to do anything with your friends from childhood, and I miss the feeling of knowing someone so well that I can read their thoughts through a mere facial expression.

Plus, almost every conversation I have on a day-to-day basis feels like it follows a script. For the people in your classes: “What class do you have next?” or “Have you done the reading yet?” For those you just met: “What’s your major?” and “Where are you from?” After you run through the routine, you have an awkward goodbye and likely don’t speak to them until next class, or you give them a brief smile when you walk past them on campus. 

I am tired of feeling uncomfortable where I live and missing everyone from home. But, most of all, it is so easy to feel like I am missing something everyone else has. Every day, I am flooded with Instagram stories of people with their “friend groups” posing in Forest Park, out at dinner, or in Olin Library. During the first couple of weeks, when I asked if someone was homesick, I usually got a “not really.” And the majority of conversations I’ve had with people about their time so far at WashU are about how much they love the parties, the campus, or the sport they’ve joined. 

After proposing this article to StudLife, I walked back to BD to meet the friends that I have from my floor. At the table, I started a conversation by saying, “I really miss home.” Everyone at the table enthusiastically agreed, and we started what became an hour-long conversation about feeling unwelcome in clubs, feeling uncomfortable with the new place, and that everyone has cliques of friends already. 

The myth that college is the best time of your life — and that the first few months are when you meet the friends you’ll stay in touch with for the rest of your life — has coded us to feel isolated in our experiences. We keep from sharing our emotions for fear of sounding pathetic (as I feared when beginning this article) or reinforcing our feeling of loneliness. 

Knowing you’re not alone is likely not going to cure your feelings right now. Yes, when adults tell you that emotions will change with time as you meet new people and grow comfortable with this new place, they’re probably right. But, in the meantime, while you still feel sh*tty and sad, start conversations with the people around you. Tell someone you eat with that you wish you were at home, or that you miss your best friends. Not only will you probably help that person feel less alone, but it could also help you process your own emotions and grow closer to the people around you, as it did for me. 

Since this conversation with my friends, I still put on my headphones and blast depressing indie music before and after class every morning. I still feel uncomfortable and miss home. And I still have surface-level small talk almost every day. But I know that the people I see around me or on Instagram laughing with their friends aren’t a signal that my feelings aren’t valid or a sign that I don’t belong here. I have started to notice how many others there are — normal college students, freshman or not — quietly living their lives with their headphones on: a picture you may not see in a college movie.