It's 2 AM

and I'm sitting here in my bed after a long night with old friends from freshman year, who never seem to grow too far apart from each other.  A group of girls who have very little in common besides open minded points of view and the Oxford experience.  Two years that somehow became so definitive for each of our lives.  Sitting there, talking about the meaningful experiences we had, negative and positive, I realized how important human connection was for us.  Because this campus is full of anonymity.
After two years on a campus of maybe 900 students plus faculty and staff, you learn everyone's name, or at least their face.  You see friends across the quad every day, you go to meals and see the same people in the dining hall, you feel a part of something larger, but never lost.

Maybe it was going out last night, or maybe it was being alone for so much of this week.  But Emory lacks the human connection that was so constant at Oxford.  I strove to eat alone there, I separated myself from the rest of the group- from my friends, from my classmates, from the campus so that I could regroup as an individual.  But that aloneness is sometimes stifling here.  The smallest interactions, the shouts across the quad, the smiles to people you don't really know, the knowledge that you can walk down the hall to your friends' room and vent about some mundane issue was immensely reassuring.  But we weren't cognizant of our need for such interaction.

Being here, I find myself seeking out the interactions that I took for granted, and even the ones that I had earlier avoided.  I feel as if I need to sit with friends at lunch, instead of purposely sitting by myself to read and regroup.  I all of a sudden dislike coming back to my room and spending time alone, when before it was the most comforting part of my day.  Being here, I feel lost.

We have been in college for two years.  But those two years were filled with an intimate community in constant interaction.  A community full of politeness and acknowledgement of others.  But being here is like being put in the middle of the city, you put the stupid face on and look past people.  You don't look at them, and you certainly don't smile.  Every once and a while you run into people you know and you say hi, or you have a meal, but it isn't an every day thing, and certainly not something that happens multiple times a day.  Your network, your community, is suddenly spread all over, and something you must actively seek to continue.  And that is stressful.

Any major change in a person's life comes with stress.  It doesn't matter if the change is positive or negative, the bigger the change the more stressful it is for the individual.  And while we can find comfort within each other, because we are going through similar experiences, it is so difficult to find the other individuals and reshape that safety net within a new context.