Acceptance. The End.
Only kidding. I'll actually write a little bit more about the subject. When I went off to college I was an Oklahoma hometown girl going off to a university with 20,000+ students. I didn't go with any close friends and went potluck on a roommate. I never gave any of this a second thought because I figured that, just as I had made friends in high school, I would make friends in college. I didn't pledge a sorority only because I was so utterly exhausted from all of the "have tos" that I had done in high school in order to get accepted to college that I only wanted to do the bare minimum required - go to class and sleep.
This meant that making friends and networking was an uphill battle. I joined groups, put myself out there, talked to my classmates and slowly but surely made some acquaintances. But the close friendships I had experienced in high school just weren't there. For years I couldn't figure out why memories of college seemed a little sour and one day I figured it out. In college, I never felt accepted for who I really was.
I always felt like my sense of humor was too dry, my laugh too loud and my wardrobe not designer enough. I have little doubt that most of this can be attributed to the immaturity of college age kids but it still stung. For me college seemed like a time when you had to keep trying on different versions of yourself in order to fit in and be one of the group. This just wasn't something I was used to and wasn't something I wanted to do in order to be accepted.
The whole subject of acceptance comes to mind when I think of Twitter. Perhaps it's because I've chosen to follow and connect with the right people (so far) but I love Twitter for the same reason I hated college - I am accepted for who I am. There are always people with whom I disagree or who probably don't love every word I tweet but we are all civil with one another. The even bigger bonus? I have found people like myself and find that we have the same sense of humor, laugh loudly too and our clothes usually come from Target. I know that age and maturity probably has a lot to do with this but I find it so refreshing to find that we all seem to have figured out who we are. And we put ourselves out there. And find we are accepted.
