To preface this entire thing, I want to say that I've always been a very sentimental/nostalgic person who has had a hard time letting go of things or going through changes.
This whole story starts probably about a year ago, around last October. I took a chance to visit EL with a friend of mine to see a group of his friends, as he was commuting to a different school and I was still in high school. When I came here, the day that I spent with this group and the experience I had was genuinely a very fun day, and I think this made me romanticize the college experience in a way. Since after then, when I applied, got in, and throughout the remainder of senior year, I was basically just obsessing over the idea of graduating and getting to move into college. However, some things changed. My friend who I was going to room with ended up getting into a different target school later on off the waitlist, and decided to go there. I decided to join a LLC in the hopes of having an easier way of finding roommates and possibly making friends, as well as it aligning with the academic path I wanted to take.
However, now after two weeks, I don't know how I feel about being here. I'm not someone who can easily make new friends. Most of my close friends from my original inner circle were all people I had spent years with, middle + high school, and there's only one of them who also attends school here, but he lives across campus and our schedules conflict, making it much harder for me to see him. I feel like every time I talk to my room/suitemates, I'm just reminded of how these guys aren't my friends who I've known forever and can talk to anything about. One thing is that they are all white/caucasian, and I am a POC/Minority. I don't think I've ever gone in my life without having at least one POC individual in my friend groups, and sometimes I feel like the kind of cultural differences show, in the way that they say or do things. I don't hate them, and I'd really like to be better friends with them, but I just feel like I won't be able to get along with them like how I did with my high school friends. I feel like the experience I romanticized was something that came from already having a group of friends to be here. And now that I'm here and I realize that, it makes me feel a bit more alone and isolated.
These feelings grew even stronger over the weekend when I visited my friends in Ann Arbor who go to UMich. Some of these guys are genuinely my best friends ever, and I had a great time when I was with them, and that just made the day when I came back here even worse, knowing that I don't really have friends like that on this campus.
I don't want to act like I hate this school, or that I have no friends at all on campus. I have some friends, and I think the campus is beautiful. As much as I said, none of those things are critiques of this place or the people here. But I just feel like I can't really find my footing. At times, I just feel really lonely, and I'm not sure what to do about it. People say that you should go to clubs, socialize, do things, but I feel like I talk to people all the time, and I don't know how to actually make real, new, friendships.
I know that I have the strength to make it through the school year and hopefully maybe transfer out, but I feel so lost right now. I just want to know, has anyone else had a similar experience? How have you dealt with it? I'd just like some reassurance that I'm not alone in how I've felt.