The first semester of my freshman year, I never went into the DC without someone with me. The days nobody could eat with me, I would skip meals or burn through my flex money. 

The stigma of sitting by myself was just too unbearable. And I know it wasn’t just me, either. 

Everyone at Bethel has had that experience where somebody asks to sit with you in the Dining Center, and you can tell it’s just because they don’t want to sit alone. But you don’t want to sit by yourself either, if you’re completely honest with yourself. 

So you’re grateful for each other as you sit across the table and ask them to remind you of their major and hometown. But you’re mostly just using each other to avoid feeling awkward by yourselves.

It might still be awkward anyway, though. And the whole interaction is a little bit like a transaction. And you feel a little icky afterward. But you also know that you’re probably going to do it again, because you don’t want to be seen in the DC by yourself while full suites and freshman dorm floors take up entire tables and look on with pity. 

There’s an obsession with community at Bethel. But sometimes I wonder if it’s more of an obsession with the appearance of community than it is authentic companionship. 

Getting over the fear of doing things by myself on campus wasn’t easy. But in the end, I have found a lot of freedom, meaning and joy in doing stuff alone. 

Loneliness vs. being alone (they’re not the same thing)

It was the first night of Welcome Week, and all of my freshman hall was crammed into the Nelson lobby. We had moved in and bid our final farewells to our parents, and now everyone was officially scoping out who their future spouse might be in the sweaty crowd. 

The RD commanded the room, and we all awaited instructions not to drink alcohol or sneak boys into our rooms past visiting hours. While those things probably were mentioned, I only took away one piece of advice from the speech. “If you find yourself alone in your dorm room watching ‘The Office,’ know that there are plenty of things to do at any time. You can make the choice not to be lonely.”

Every time I found myself alone after that, whether it was going to church, cooped up in my dorm doing homework on the weekends or practicing my violin, I felt a tug of guilt for not having someone else with me. 

This is my fault, I would tell myself. I’m wasting my time in college by not having a group of friends around. 

But the problem wasn’t that I was doing things alone. The problem was that I believed loneliness and being alone were the same thing, and that every time I was by myself, I was, in fact, in a pitiable state of loneliness. 

After a lot of reflection, I’ve found that, for me, loneliness is actually more of a self-perception issue. It’s floundering in that space between what my life looked like and what I thought it should look like. Looking back, it usually wasn’t the facts of my situation, but how I was interpreting them. 

And if I’m completely honest, I think most Bethel students probably wouldn’t want my Bethel experience. 

I’ve never had that full Lissner suite that took professional photos together, or a crowded table in the DC for daily lunches. My sophomore year, four of my suitemates moved out of our Arden Village townhouse the semester I returned from studying away. I spent most nights that winter by myself in an empty suite. 

I certainly have made wonderful, lifelong friends at Bethel, especially on a one-on-one level. But the picturesque, big friend group that was portrayed as the universal Bethel experience at Welcome Week and on Instagram was something I never had. 

And that’s OK. It wasn’t my fault my friends moved back home, transferred from Bethel or decided college wasn’t for them. But it took a really long time not to blame myself for the fact that it felt like I had few friends at all. 

In that state of self-blame that winter, I tried everything I could to make friends for the sake of company. I texted random people I knew freshman year and asked to get dinner. I sat with people in the DC after my classes. I went to Student Ministries events and even randomly applied to be an RA. 

But most people at that point in the year weren’t looking to forge new friendships. They had full suites of best friends to go back to and a packed, color-coded Google calendar to keep up with.

It felt like I had missed the ship. The attempts I made to connect made me feel lonelier than I would have felt if I had just stayed in my dorm by myself. 

Did I really choose to be lonely? Should I have shown up to more events at the Underground? Actually attended sophomore shack? Invited more people to eat with me just to not feel alone? 

But then I realized that if the ship left without me, maybe I was never meant to be on it. 

Some of my favorite nights at Bethel have been tucked away in my dorm room reading a mind-stretching book, meticulously learning Bob Dylan tabs on my banjo, pausing for a contemplative moment over Lake Valentine, worshipping at Vespers alone or finding myself deep in prayer behind the Widen trees (usually interrupted by the clinking chains of disc golfers hitting the basket thingy). The study away experience I had in Oregon the first semester of my sophomore year was probably one of the most intellectually and spiritually formative things that happened to me, even if it uprooted me from the Bethel community once I arrived halfway through the year. 

My experience has shown that the opposite of loneliness is not being surrounded with people, but contentment with the precious gift of life.

The people I will keep near me once I graduate are the ones that I would never have to seek out at a function in the Underground. I don’t ever have to remind them that I exist by inviting them to the DC on a random weeknight. And I’ve never once had to change myself or chase after them to not feel alone. 

The second semester of my sophomore year, I did the scary thing. I walked into the DC with nobody but CS Lewis (in the form of a book), marched up the stairs to the second floor and found more peace than I expected. 

It took a while for me not to feel self-conscious every time that happened. But things got easier.  And rather than filling my lunches and dinners with surface-level conversation, I spent more time reading good books, watching the seasons change outside the windows, enjoying the little gifts of life that I hadn’t had the quiet to enjoy before and pouring into the few good friends that I could count on one of my hands. 

For anyone struggling with loneliness, please know, first and foremost, that you are not alone. Second, there is so much beauty and meaning in solitude. Even though Bethel makes it feel like you’re failing if you’re not surrounded by eight other people at your dinner table or in your Instagram photo dumps, there’s a lot of joy to be discovered that you might not notice otherwise. Don’t be afraid to go find it.