Looking back on 18-year-old me, recently graduated from high school, full of hope, full of dreams of what would come in my life, I remember a young man who was free to create, innovate and engage in the wonderful social and educational experience which the University of South Carolina offered.
Going in, I knew exactly what I thought college would be and what I wanted college to be: a place of personal development and improvement. I knew exactly what I needed college to be: a place where I was going to find my purpose in this world. A place where I could meet lifelong friends and get involved. A place where I could matter. Among thousands and thousands of students, faculty and staff, I would matter.
That’s what all colleges, universities and institutes of higher education promise.
So it comes as no surprise that when I was dropped off on move in day I felt the electricity in the air. I felt the promise of mattering and making a difference in this world.
There was a metaphorical door and on one side was everything as I saw it and knew it — the world as an 18-year-old understood it. There was my family, my past and a future that was laid out right in front of me.
But on the other side, soon after the departure of my family and the beginning of my collegiate career, was everything I couldn’t see, everything I didn’t know: unsolved problems, unexpressed emotions, unrealized possibilities so innumerable that imagining them is inconceivable.
So I went out searching for it, knowing this was where I was going to fit in — the university that had accepted me. However, the more I went searching the less I found. Greek life, intramural sports, student organization fairs — there were tons of things that I would have liked to do, but something stopped me from joining them. Thomas Cooper, Strom and Russell House were all places that I could go, but I felt no meaningful connection to them and there were no true relationships with other students to be found.
Five Points was only a success if you could remember it the next day.
There were all of these places, all of these promises, all of these opportunities and, yet, I couldn’t fulfill any of them. I couldn’t believe it. I felt alone. I felt that I didn’t belong.
But looking around at other students I knew I was the only one who felt this way. I could see it on my peers’ faces. They got it. They understood. They fit in. They were happy.
I thought, “How could this be? How could everyone else have figured it out except for me? This is my school. My opportunity. My life.”
I saw students pass me on campus and take out their phones, obviously looking at a message from their friends. I saw students eating alone at Russell House on their computers, clearly working on creating the next Facebook or Google. I saw groups students studying together at the library with future lifelong friends.
Meanwhile, I would be at the library studying with a group that I was assigned to for one of my classes. I was eating alone at Russell House pretending to be doing something important on my computer so that people wouldn’t think I was alone. I would pull out my phone while walking past someone on campus, knowing that it hadn’t vibrated, knowing I had no new messages, no new notifications. It was simply to pretend I had someone to talk to. To offer up the facade that I belonged.
But I soon realized that it wasn’t just me. I was simply the only one who would acknowledge it.
Everyone is struggling to feel like they belong and that they matter. We all want meaningful relationships. We hunger for meaningful communication. We yearn for the opportunity to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
So if we return to our door, then we realize that the other side of it, the side I thought I was stepping into on move in day three years ago, is not an alternate reality, but something even harder to fathom: that which has not yet been created.
That which we must create.