By Brooke Cranford | LTVN Reporter

As college students, we are told these will be the best four years of our lives. Few people, however, talk about how isolating college can be. For many students, the transition is difficult and intimidating. You are leaving behind everything and everybody to travel to a new place alone.

What typically gets left out is the emptiness that comes from sitting alone in your dorm room because your roommate is out. You can be lying on the floor, lost in thought, because the silence makes you miss your parents, friends, pets or siblings. There are nights when you lie alone, trying to drown out the sound with a random TV show or music, but sometimes the loneliness is too loud.

Social media intensifies this problem. When scrolling through people’s posts or TikToks, it seems like everybody has already found their best friends and are living their best life to the fullest. It becomes a competition of who can look the busiest or who has the most friends. In real life, the same people are trapped in their dorms, wondering why they don’t have the same level of joy as others.

Even in a sea of many other people, you could be alone or isolated. This is not because there are no people or friends; it is simply a matter of being unaware of this feeling. Loneliness is a widespread problem that many students experience, yet most keep to themselves, typically because it is perceived as a weakness. To acknowledge that you are lonely is often seen as admitting failure when everyone else appears to be thriving.

But staying silent only intensifies the situation.

Supposing college is only a time to party and have a good time leads students to believe that it is not okay to feel sad or miss home. College is a huge transition that is often marked by football games, traditions, study dates and late-night adventures. However, they are also peaceful moments in between, filled with ideas and music. It is hard to acknowledge these moments as normal because it feels like everyone else is moving on with their lives and you’re stuck back in the past. In reality, you are where you’re meant to be.

What we need is honesty. We need to deepen our conversations past the pictures and videos on our screens. College life is not all tailgating and partying. Sure, there are some great times, but we also need to acknowledge the challenging ones — the ones with tears and homesickness, when you come to understand how quickly life is passing and how hurtful growing up can be.

There’s the pressure to find your people. But behind the picture-perfect college life, something that we all need to remember is that it’s alright to feel alone. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong when you’re lonely. To be lonely is to be human, just like everyone else. So let’s talk about it.