Don’t Lose Touch
My housemates & I getting in the spirit of Christmas during our junior year.
During college, you spend four years surrounded by the same people. These neighbors, classmates and roommates soon turn into your closest friends. You spend a few months apart during the summers, but nothing prepares you for the separation that happens after graduation.
It’s been over a year since I’ve graduated college and I rarely see or talk to my friends from school. We’ve arranged a few meet-ups here and there and wish each other happy birthdays, but it’s much different than it was in college. I’ve realized that this is almost inevitable, and is based on a few reasons.
The first reason is something I can’t control- distance. The friends I made at college just all happen to live far away. The closest one lives about 2.5 hours from me and the farthest is around 6. While many of them live near each other or in a large city with good transportation, I live way up in the middle of nowhere (some refer to it as Canada, but it’s really just upstate NY). This fact alone makes it hard for me to go to group events and activities with them. It’s hard to see Facebook photos of all the fun they have on weekends together and how sometimes I’m not even invited due to my distance (or maybe it’s for another reason entirely, who knows!).
Another reason is that we’re simply all busy. Most of us work full-time jobs and have little vacation days since we have only been in the workplace for a year or less. It’s hard to plan things at such a short-notice with everyone’s work schedules. On top of being busy from work, we all have our own new lives now. Some of us live at home and have family activities to do, some live with our friends, and some want to spend time with our long-distance boyfriends who we rarely get to see.
Although I try to keep in touch with my friends through social media or texting, it seems that everyone is just so distant. I feel bad for not spending more time trying to talk to them and find out what’s going on in their lives, but they aren’t exactly blowing up my phone either. I don’t put blame on them or myself solely; I think it’s just really tough to keep in touch after college in general. I try not to take all of this personally, and attribute it to the factors listed above- distance and our busy lives.
With that being said, I do miss all the things we did. Whether it was our daily ritual of watching “Friends” as we were preparing dinner, the themed parties we threw every year, or the chaotic trips to the city to get our picture in front of the tree, I miss spending time with them.
You can read the full article at its original source here and read all the articles in my column here.
