A letter from May 31, 2025

Hey, If you remember correctly this is exactly the second draft of this letter. The first time you wrote it on your phone and tried to scroll up to fix the brightness but accidentally refreshed the page. Just to give you a refresher for where you were a year ago. Your are in the last summer of your life and decided to write this letter because your page has been bombarded with people who have seemingly lived the perfect college career. Had the large friend groups. The active social and romantic lives. The close knit friend group to who them they share various intimate memories with and will miss very much after graduation. And it's made you think about how in a years time you will have to admit that you ****** it up. Everyone remarks about how college is THE time of your life to meet people. That is will never be easier to make and keep friends because your literally trapped with 100s of people in the same exact stage of life as you. And yet somehow you managed to make it three (most likely four but hey maybe things change) years not making a single real friend and keeping your virginity at a school notorious for hookups. A year from now you will be at graduation, watching groups of friends say tearful goodbyes and making plans to see each other. And you will be rushing out as soon as possible to stop yourself from feeling jealous. Let's take a trip down memory lane to remember how you got here. It's freshman year. You won't admit it but you're excited to be in a new environment. You try to temper your hopes because you know you didn't have the good of luck in high school but surely that was Covid's doing and not your own. But you arrive at freshman week and it seems like everyone has already formed their friend groups. You try doing what everyone suggest and just start conversations with anyone because everyone is a lost freshman desperate for friends. But no, turns out its just you. You eat lunch alone again, just like you did in high school but this time you get the opportunity to eat breakfast and dinner alone because you don't have a kitchen. And the only time your not alone is when your in a room with a roommate that your not very fond of and whose not very fond of you. But you keep your head down. Find things to do to past the time. You get a part time job. Take up running and reading as hobbies. Even explore the city some. But none of it is enough to erase the fantasy you had created senior year of high school. Of building the beginnings of lifelong friendships, long nights out partying or even just hanging out, and going through various romantic partners like the college students on TV do. It sucks to admit that the best day of that entire year was the day we left because then it was finally over. But its ok. You landed an high paying internship in a new city which comes with a new opportunity to make friends. You join the group chats and talk to anyone who will listen that first day, everything you wished you had done freshman week. But yet again, nothing. You spend your 6-2am scrolling through tiktok until you past out from exhaustion or extreme boredom. The most interesting weekend you have all summer is fourth of July weekend. Not because you hung out with friends but because you had the gall to order a whole pizza, garlic knots, and side salad for yourself to celebrate the four day weekend. But its ok again. Because surely sophomore year will be different. You're a Taurus. Change is hard for you. You didn't do well either time because you didn't know what to expect. You follow all the party pages, talk to anyone who will listen that first week, and go to all the club interest meetings. You use your internship money to basically pay people to hang out with you. But still, you spend every weekend scrolling through tiktok and masturbating. This time, the most interesting weekend you have is the one where you go and visit your sister. Not because you guys had such bonding time but because you got into such an explosive argument that you didn't talk for the rest of the year. This coupled with the fact that you got the worse grades of your life makes it by far the worse year of your life. But at least this time you know what you're getting into. You accepted a return offer at the internship you had the previous year (no other place wanted you). You stay in the same apartment and even work out of the same building as last summer. And you have the same exact summer. But this time, the most eventful weekend of your life was a brief trip back home which was admittingly nice. By junior year, your used to the loneliness. The long hours spent imaging scenarios of a prettier, funnier, smarter version of you with a decent friend group and a doting, hot boyfriend (or girlfriend but your still not quite ready to confront that yet). You get a part time job because the sound sound of your roommate hanging out with her friends makes you have dark thoughts. It doesn't matter that you make a 1/3 of what you did during the summer. Or that you don't get home until 2am most nights even though your first class is at 9. Or that you somewhere always get the most hours whenever you have a test coming up. Or that 80% of your coworkers have no idea how to do your job and the work ethic your parent instilled in you forces you to pick up their slack. Because it is quite literally the only time you talk to people most days. It quickly becomes your favorite part of the day. You count down the hours until you can clock it and get paid minimum wage to give yourself knee/back problems and third degree burns. Because it quick literally the only time that people acknowledge your existence. You realize that you forgot what it's like to laugh with a group a people because it had been so long since you had a conversation with someone other than the grocery store clerk just trying to be polite. When the school year is ending, you don't get sad that you'll be away from friends or will lose a piece of freedom when you go back home. Your sad because you'll have to go back to going days without talking to anyone. And that takes us to now. Your last ever summer vacation, first one where your old enough to legally drink, and yet nothing has changed. You accepted a different internship, at a different city and a little part of you goes back to that old delusion. But reality hits very quickly. Nothing has changed. And it's almost certain that a significant portion of my life post grad is going to look like this. Endless hours scrolling through various social medias, only taking breaks to eat, shower, sleep, and masturbate. Logically, I know what I should do to change this. I know that I should reach out to the other interns or just leave my apartment more often. But then I start to think about my past attempts of reaching out to community and failing every single time. I can't take the humiliation again. After a while, you just kind of accept it. It's not as bad as it was freshman year. Now, you can get lost for hours in your fantasies of that better version of you. You don't cry the loneliness anymore. You cheer yourself up by convincing yourself that you never wanted the typically college experience anyways. You only ever cared about getting your degree and getting a high paying job which you are on track to do both within a years time. But that's not entirely true. If I'm being honest, I'm writing this letter with the hopes that in a year from now things will be different. I will have somehow overcame my social anxiety and will have found a group of people to enjoy my very last year of college with. And that I'll have memories and people to look back on fondly. That I'll be struggling to hold back tears at graduation because of what I'll be leaving behind. But I know myself. And I know that that's not likely. I guess that delusional will never go away fully. Humans are social by nature. I'm afraid that I'll turn to other things to cope with the loneliness with our family's past and that scares me. But I honestly don't know what to do. Making any sort of social connection feels very much impossible. Every time I try to talk to someone in that way it's like my body reacts like I'm a soldier at war. And no matter how that interaction goes, I convince myself that I was the biggest bother to that persons day and that they hate me. And it takes me several months to gain the courage to do it again. I don't know. I hope you're not sad reading this. And if you are sad I hope it's because your sad for the past version of you not the current version. Either way, I love you. Bests, Past You