Friends and acquaintances, I want to take this opportunity to admit something to you. It has been four years in the making and I am still coming to terms with my transgression. I was that guy, that insufferable, over-eager pre-freshman who found it absolutely necessary to prematurely add people on Facebook during the limbo from end of high school to the beginning of college. In my head, by friending upwards of 50 people, I would become popular by pure online familiarity and by being the kid everyone knows before they even get to school. I would become a “fan favorite,” and go on to rub elbows with the movers and shakers of the university. Now, as I sit and write this in bed, where I have in fact been sitting for the past 5 hours (it’s 9 p.m.) while concurrently watching Scrubs for the third time, it is plain to see that none of that really happened, but at the same time, it was a step in the right direction.
While I could sit and think back to these past four years and think about my premature friending and all the other embarrassing things I’ve done, at this stage in my life I can faithfully say I regret nothing. Obviously this is because I will never see most of you again, but I’d also like to think that my egregious Facebook-friending of yore have turned out to be a boon. How else would I have met most of my friends if I wasn’t, in general, shameless?
Anecdotes in my collegiate life reassure me of this. Someone recently told me that the first day he saw me bounding towards him in the Elder hallway during move-in day, he instantly recognized me as the kid who had friended him months before. And of course, I recognized him as the kid from Connecticut with whom (in my mind) I had a pleasant Facebook conversation a few months back — when really he was trying to call me out for being generally socially inept. He shrunk back into his own room, hoping I would take note of his disinterest and move on. Another time during freshman year, I met someone during an opening week picnic and the first thing I said to him was, “you are x right? We’re friends on Facebook.” He smiled knowingly, which I took to be friendship, but really it took him another quarter and a half to move past his idea of me as a complete freak. In another wonderful instance, I saw that someone posted a picture wearing the same Northwestern t-shirt that I had and I commented on the picture saying, “I have the same shirt and rock it around campus proudly!” This little nugget was unearthed years later by a friend at a time when I had put these stories behind me. Rereading that comment was the death of me, and if I was not so brown, you could still see me cheeks turning red as it is brought up in conversation.
Meeting people in real life after having friended them ranged from the ultra-awkward to the general ignoring of the fact that they already knew me. But I never felt ostracized or avoided during my first few weeks here. I’d like to think it has everything to do with my wit and charm, but I know it has just as much to do with everyone else being in the same predicament as me, of wanting to meet as many new people as possible. The thought never even crossed my mind that I would possibly be creeping everyone out. I thought my peers would appreciate that I was making the effort to reach out to them. As I look back, though, I think I was right. As much as we want to play it cool and meet others without seeming too desperate, we were all overeager freshmen to some degree. With that being said, I regret nothing. As cringe-worthy as those stories are, I’m not scared to say that I’m glad I went out on a limb and forcefully wedged myself into these people’s lives. The first two I mentioned are now, to their general dismay, some of my best friends. The third one: I am not so sure if he can stand me, but I give him the benefit of a doubt.
I know my heart will soon be in tatters, as it is even thinking about the transition out of this place. To stem the tide of emotions and feelings that is continuously building up, most of it hunger, I have decided to take on a new philosophy. As Martin Luther King Jr., or some other misattributed speaker, once said, “You’re openly losing oxygen,” more colloquially known as YOLO. I never really understood what this means or why people run around annoyingly saying this at inopportune moments, but I like the spirit. I’ve redefined it for myself as something that says I need to act as if I live only once. I won’t fret about little things, as I have the past few years over my various Facebook stories. While it may seem from my retelling of this story that I may have alienated a lot of people, I think it’s exactly the opposite. If I hadn’t done what I did, I would know probably half as many people, and my life would be half as enjoyable. All I can say four years down the line is that friending all those people in that period of my life was the best decision of my undergraduate career.