Yash Goyal
Starting college can be incredibly exciting and at the same time, a nerve-wracking experience. As we meet new people and find who we get along with the most, the cementing of a stable friendship still takes time. For a few, it is a few weeks or even a couple of months, but one thing is clear:
Developing Trust takes time and it is tested through every moment of the socialising process in classes, mess, hang-out spots on campus.
Eventually, groups form and the dynamics change from one-on-one conversations to intra-group. This sometimes leads to less attention to already established one-on-one friendships within the groups with the admission of a new person who may seem more interesting or even takes up more space through the projection of their personalities.
Here comes the unpleasant territory of insecurity when a person feels a decline in their social importance.
This leads to ego tussles and a person may feel anxious, angry and even resentful. This leads to the person withdrawing from the group and starts from scratch.
This is a classic problem many college-going students face. These complex issues almost always end grimly and even though the problem of betrayal, talking over a person, innocuous ignorance can be offensive to active perpetrators, it nevertheless scars the victim.
Why does this happen though?
1) Perceived lack of initiative in the friendship
2) Talking passively
3) Being too aggressive
These are a few reasons when the victim's actions and habits can backfire, unbeknownst to them. However, when it comes to the lack of a victim's fault and even in the above situation, it can be very painful for him/her.
I have seen a few of my friends experience this in college. They often develop social anxiety and a persistent low mood unless they somehow start talking to new people and develop an understanding with them.
Having three hundred people in the batch excluding seniors, and yet not having a dependable set of friends at any phase of your college life seems extremely unnerving and haunting.
This is synonymous to urban isolation such that a crowd of hundreds walking past you in the academic spine at FLAME, people rushing to their classes and yet, one worries whether he/she is intruding into another's space, thereby avoiding all forms of social contact.
Bringing up your personal issues with institutional support bodies is easier said than done especially when marred with an ambiguity of the problem itself.
This is why we urge people to create openness among each other so that there are no hard feelings and issues can be resolved inter-personally. There needs to more room for people to let out their feelings than to repress them.
We can do this by being more empathetic and internalising the gravity of people's problems as if they were our own. This is because even when one may question "why", it is key that we humbly accept that this can happen with anyone, and it is not really rare. Never was.