#congratulations you now know more about my personal life i'm just soppy sappy about seeing people around my campus again

[shadowqnights]

I’m in my final year of university right now and I’ll be graduating soon. I’m as socially anxious as they come and large groups of unfamiliar people get to me easily. But after so many years of university/high school of being shut away from everything thanks to the big C there’s something so goddamn beautiful about returning to my final year on campus and seeing life. Seeing people. I graduated as the pandemic was getting kicking at 17 and have been at college for every year since. Almost all of my classes have been online - the ones that weren’t were soon after switched to zoom anyway. I work a pretty reclusive job at my uni to boot so I spend most of my time inside staring at a screen either studying or working - last trimester, I was walking through a mostly empty library and could wander around campus and maybe see one or two people on my way. I figured that the transition into orientation would be rough for my anxiety. 

But I went to the pool today; I talked happily with the receptionist at my gym and asked her questions. When I asked if I could share a lane with a mother with her son in the one next to her, she moved to be with him so I could have one to myself and called me ‘love’. I saw a swim class, girls teaching little kids how to paddle while their parents watched proudly. I walked down to the gym and I passed people, oh my god so many people, people riding their bikes and people talking to their friends on the phone gossiping and people walking to class. I walked back to my night job and fucking died on that ungodly steep hill back up to the main campus but it was still so worth it to pass everyone. My friends were at the cafe by complete chance. We’ll go to trivia in a couple of weeks. 

There are people in the library, there are people on campus. I’m the first person to admit that large quantities of people scare me and for months I was scared for this year to begin because I knew that my university would be seeing a huge swell of activity again and I thought it’d ruin me. But idk man. The world’s so full of life and it’s so beautiful and people smile at me when they walk past even though we don’t know each other and it’s just so good to exist. My hormones go up and down and I’m definitely totally very much hormonal rn but I really hope this feeling stays.