Finding Community in College

I walked into the room, staunch in my conviction that I could and would be social today. It was a fellowship meeting filled with people I hadn’t met before and it was my first year at Berkeley. I wanted to have the kind of social life that I’d seen in movies and TV shows about college. I walked in with high hopes. Six minutes later, those hopes were six feet underground.

I remember leaving my first fellowship meeting at college as a freshman. I walked past one of the benches in front of the architecture building, and it seemed to call to me. It was night. I sat on the bench and broke down crying.

The fellowship had so many people who already knew each other and spoke in groups together. I spoke to one or two people but I definitely was not meeting the success metrics of my carefully laid “Cal Social Life” plan. I did what any insecure college student would do. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my iPhone to pass the time away while projecting an image of security and productivity. I decided to shrink into my own world so I wouldn’t be rejected by the world around me.

I went back to my dorm to write my heart out about how I didn’t think I was going to belong here at Berkeley.

I also wrote about how toxic the experience felt to me. It was like a competition, fighting for each other’s attention, proving to others that you’re someone worth remembering. If you didn’t have a put-together elevator pitch of who you were, you would simply not exist.

For the majority of my college experience, I was fighting that “ugly reality” everywhere I went. I joined GBO, our orientation program, to be someone who facilitated the development of communities where that kind of competition didn’t need to exist. As a leader, I could act when someone wasn’t given the chance to talk in the group or when cliques started developing; I could fold the people on the margins into the inner circle. I loved that I had that power.

When I joined the Suitcase Clinic, I fought hard for unhoused members to be included in the conversation in city council meetings.

They have the right to be seen and known so that their struggles are not unnoticed. They should get the help they deserve.

And yet—even as I curated this social justice warrior identity where people knew me as one who fights for the cause of others, I could not fill the hole in my heart. The Christian fellowship was some kind of reminder for me that I wasn’t enough.

To soothe myself, I turned to my favorite source of comfort: to-do lists. I created a long list of activities I would have to do for classes or clubs and even created a daily checklist for what habits I should be working on. The checkmarks brought me affirmation that I was on the right path. With every checkmark, I felt closer to my goals and plans. I felt like I could finally call myself a productive college student, a well-prepared, pre-med woman.

As I continued on an achievement rollercoaster fueled by busyness, I found myself increasingly facing burnout. I could no longer confront my insecurities by adding more to my resume. Having an Instagrammable and LinkedIn-approvable life wasn’t providing me true comfort.

It was exhausting. Every failed midterm made me doubt myself. Would I ever be good enough? I was happy for minutes when I completed what I had to do and unhappy for hours when I didn’t. Achievement brought me some comfort but it wasn’t enough.

Friendship was tough. I didn’t know why, but fellowship meeting anxiety never ceased. Why? What was wrong about this community that made me feel this way when I didn’t seem to struggle in the same way in other circles?

I prayed. It was a prayer that God didn’t answer for a long time. During my whole college journey, I asked God why it was so difficult for me to feel like I belonged in this small community. And I told myself that it only happened in this small club, but in reality, I had felt this way in many settings. When I first moved to a new middle school, I definitely struggled to find my place. When I was in that corny Christian dance team during the end of middle school, I definitely struggled to feel at home in the “family” of other Christians. And in high school, I found myself resorting to the busyness of academics and extracurriculars to drown out the loneliness.

And that’s exactly what I did in college as well. I left the fellowship meetings early because I “had homework” or left no time to hang out with others in the fellowship because I “had a club meeting.” I joined five clubs to give me something to do so that I didn’t have time to think about my loneliness. And I was proud of myself for that.

I was too tired to try. Every time I went out, I came back feeling lonely. This culminated in a mission trip I went on over the summer. I was forced to meet students I had never talked to before on top of being exhausted with our daily schedule. I gave up trying to talk to people until the final day when everyone was reflecting on their experience.

One of the students who went on the trip and sat beside me for many of the days had also been struggling with family, mental health, and school. She shared a touching testimony of loneliness that was filled with people not reaching out to her. I felt so convicted. My loneliness had contributed to others feeling lonely. I was part of a cycle of loneliness where I tried to find comfort in not being rejected by others but always ended up not feeling comforted enough.

During my junior year of college, I started a relationship, and I soon realized that my busyness needed to stop. Not only was I constantly burnt out, but I was hurting the one I cared about because I couldn’t be present with him, whatever that meant for our unique personalities.

I was slowly learning to stop.

When I was in the fellowship as a senior, I found myself being able to stop. I stopped my thoughts and sat in the uncomfortableness of my own anxiety. Observed my inability to be fun and witty and cool at the retreat when everyone was there to hang out. Saw how some of my jokes worked and some didn’t. And as everyone giggled continuously and night was falling, I left the circle to sleep early. Quitting clubs and gaining time in the day helped me breathe and think about what had happened.

After that mission trip, I came to see that I was really just trying to avoid discomfort and so I kept to myself more. I realized that moments of discomfort might not have been the source of my deeper discomfort. I saw that God had been with me in all of my uncomfortable situations. The multitude of them that I had experienced in my life were moments orchestrated by God, where I saw Him using my discomfort to create something beautiful within me, slowly but surely. Failing a midterm, being rejected by a friend, and so many more moments only drew me closer to a God in whose grace I could rest in freely. I could stop doing and start being.

As I grew in experiencing God’s grace, I met Christine. She shared similar struggles with me. We were united in trying to understand where God was in our discomfort. As we felt secure in Christ, we felt as if we could reach out to each other and others around us more. I loved chatting with Carissa once a week. We read a chapter of a book together to talk about God, but also talked about life. My boy problems, her struggles with the MCAT and how we’d felt anxious or at home in each of the fellowship meetings. What I loved best was that if I had no one to talk to at the fellowship, I had Carissa.

We felt so encouraged by our relationship that we were willing to be the ones who would step into the discomfort most. That led to the birth of our fellowship’s hospitality team. God used our social discomfort for our good, and He gave us a friend. We wanted to be the “Carissa” and “Christine” for the new students in need of a friend to help them find God in their discomfort.

For a long time, we were seeking the kind of comfort that is driven by fear. Fear of never being enough, fear of never being loved or known or seen. As we grew in Christ and drew closer to God and each other, however, we started to experience the comfort that is driven by faith.

2 Timothy 1:7 says, “For God gave us a spirit, not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” Comfort isn’t found where we often look for it. It’s found in God, who works especially outside of our comfort zones. Christ overcame the world so we can rest in that comfort, not in ourselves.