Student Blog: An Ode to My Friends, My Chosen Family

With each passing year, life seemingly gets a little bit harder, a little bit tougher. It's easy to let our responsibilities overtake us and engulf our days, leaving us exhausted both mentally and physically.

Yet as the day rolls on, there is something that keeps me going, something that fills up my busy hours with laughter and joy.

My friends.

There aren't enough words to describe the importance of friendship, and more personally, there aren't enough words to describe the compassion and levity that my friends have given me. In what has been a particularly rough couple of years for everyone, we have all had to lean on one another now more than ever. Life can be dejecting and difficult, but our friends are what remind us all of the happiness we can feel despite those things.

Humans need other humans. There is no way around it. We need people to share our victories with and grovel in our sadness with. Life is made up of so many different experiences, and all of those experiences are made better when someone you love is by your side.

I am lucky to have found caring and generous friends in so many different places. Good people are all around us, and we need them to keep going.

My parents recently moved over six hundred miles away, and we are now farther apart than ever before. I have quickly come to realize that having family nearby is a privilege, and is something that I don't know I fully appreciated until they were gone. In their absence, my friends have taken over and reminded me how much love I am surrounded by on a daily basis. Whether it be a phone call from a friend at another college asking me how I am, reuniting with an old roommate, or the girls that I live with giving me a hug without me even having to ask, the people in my life have overfilled my cup with endless warmth and kindheartedness.

These are the kinds of people who know just what to say when I'm on the verge of tears and just what to say to have me rolling over with laughter. We are our best when we are together, and uplift each other when we are apart.

It is a rarity to find those who can truly finish your sentences and know exactly how you are feeling just by taking one look at you. What an honor it has been to find the people who make me feel less alone in what can be a big and scary world.

Family is not always blood. Family is about the people who take you in as their own and fill in the holes in your heart, whether you are related to them or not.

I have been lucky enough to find friends who I consider my chosen family, who I know will not only continue to be beaming rays of sunshine in my life, but those who I can count on forever.

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