P R O F’ S P L A C E

It took me a while to find my people.

Being social was something I had to work on, as opposed to it coming naturally, and that was the case even back home so can you imagine what it was like, being surrounded by strangers, having to start all over again.

But that’s what I wanted.

the familiar led me to the unfamiliar actually. I went to an African Student meeting in my dorm building and met people that ended up being central to my college experience in general.

I won’t mention them, but they know who they are. 🤍

My newly acquired friends and I went to different occasions together, mainly frat parties or parties thrown by sports team members.

If we weren’t at parties, we were at prof’s place, where they had subs (jersey mike’sssss) and chicken tenders that sometimes tasted like cardboard, and other times tasted delicious (thank you, taylor port).

I learned how to roll my first J, tried alcohol combinations that, should come with a warning sign, made it back to my dorm at all hours of the night, all in an attempt to find out what Anna, the true me, really enjoyed and really wanted.

I’ve always wanted to just “fit in”, and never could. I think the lack of embracing that made it worse for me, looking back, if I had any idea who I truly was, I wouldn’t even be in certain spaces.

It started out fun, the newness of it all, trying things for the first time, until it became cumbersome, because you now have an identity, a label, a cage.

You generally identify as the most prominent characteristics about you (goofy, moody, quiet, hyper) and, I realized, maybe I’m too complex to be given a correct label.

It wasn’t fun anymore because now I was my label, when really I could be or feel like a million different people at a time.

It was hard to find my center when I was in public, so my default was to lean into who people thought I was or wanted me to be, even if it felt off or inauthentic to my truest self.

Either way, it was an amazing opportunity to test myself against persons I’d never really exposed to.

Some experiences were fruitful and long lasting, some wild, almost surreal.

We’ll talk about it all.