Living With Strangers - The Loneliness Of My Second Year

Hey guys! It’s Matt here. 

I’ve been wondering what to write for my latest blog post – we’ve covered fitting into your new house, as well as surviving third year, and we’ve had some awesome people sharing some great stuff about close friendships at uni, being in denial about your anxiety, surviving in the workplace and overcoming social anxiety. 

Photo by bruce mars from Pexels

So….. what next?

Well, I thought I’d tell you a story about my own loneliness during university. I did my BA degree over four years. It was only a three year course, but I ended up repeating second year for various reasons. During second year and fourth year, I had years where I found some genuinely awesome people to live with and I made friends who I’ve stayed in touch with. They were my happiest years. 

But in between… it was a different story.

So lets head to third year (which was second year again, this is complicated isn’t it?). At this point, half of my housemates from the previous year had graduated and moved away to find pastures new, and so it was left to me and the remaining pal that I had lived with to move to a new place….. with complete strangers. 

Things were alright to start with. As is the case in a lot of student houses, we met everyone early on and we all shook hands and introduced ourselves. It was a five person, entirely male-occupied house and we had met two of the lads within a couple of days. The third one didn’t seem to ever be in. until one day…. Me and my friend were making dinner in the kitchen, when we heard the front door open. We knew the other two lads were in and so it could only be one person. We exchanged a nervous glance. We heard footsteps up the stairs, followed by a short pause, at which point the footsteps seemed to backtrack and all of a sudden the kitchen door opened. “Hi, I’m dave (or at least that’s the name I’ll give him)”. We all shook hands, before Dave darted back upstairs.

Well… at least we’d met everyone now.

The house had a bit of an unusual layout – at least in comparison to the other student houses I’d been in. The house was three floors and it started on the middle floor. The middle and top floor consisted of mostly just bedrooms and hallways, with a bathroom at the top of the stairs, and there wasn’t much in the way of windows or natural light. The only “social” area, was downstairs in the basement, where there was a modern, comfortable pair of sofas on a laminate floor. There was also a washing machine and a second bathroom down there. 

Things were alright for a while. I stuck with the friend that I’d lived with previously, as we were on the same course and we had met during the first few months of first year – so we knew each other well at this point.

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Our bedrooms were next to each other and I would always knock on his door when I got home from uni. We would then grab a hot chocolate and fire up the PlayStation. 

A worrying sign early on, was that none of the other lads seemed to leave their rooms that often. We’d occasionally bump into them in the kitchen or around the house and exchange smiles and other pleasantries. Dave’s room was on the other side of mine, on the top floor, and he would spend most evenings skyping his girlfriend. 

The lead tenant, a lad who I’ll call Mike, was the sole remaining tenant from the previous year. He had a bit more confidence than the others, and he’d always be happy to make small talk and take the lead with allocating chores, so that we at least had some form of communication as a household.

Problems began to occur for me personally, when my friend started to go home frequently. To provide context, he suffered from anxiety and depression and, now that he was in his final year, he wanted to be in a more comfortable space to work on his assignments. We lived on a really busy road in one of the city’s suburbs, and I would often be woken up early by morning traffic, as my bedroom looked out onto the street. So I could relate to his struggles at least. 

I then ventured into a phase, which lasted several months, where it felt like I was living in a mini block of flats. We essentially just had a shared bathroom and kitchen, but otherwise we all stayed within our comfort zones. I can still recall getting a bit of stick from my family for not “making an effort” with the others, but I always tried to explain that it was a two-way service. Nobody else seemed remotely bothered about creating some kind of atmosphere. 

Photo by Antonio Prado from Pexels

At times, I almost welcomed it – I’m a shy, anxious person and I appreciate my alone time, and so being in a household where there was no pressure to speak to the others wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But this created further issues, as it became harder to go and make dinner or use other parts of the house in case I bumped into the others. 

Whenever my friend was around, we did try and reach out to some of the others. I recall that we left a note for Dave, the lad next door to me. I don’t remember the exact wording, but we had noticed his interest in football and invited him to the pub to watch a game sometime. He was delighted that we’d been so warm and we had a nice moment with him when he discovered the note, but that was as far as it went. 

The one positive that I could count on, was that I had a couple of friends from my course who I would sometimes meet up with, which got me out of the house for a few hours. But as we lived a fair distance out of town, it was always a difficult journey back up the hill to the dark, silent house. 

Photo by Conner Eastwood from Pexels

As the academic year drew to a close, I found comfort in the knowledge that I could start planning for third year, and make sure I had some common ground with my new housemates. I would be on my own this time, as my friend would be graduating and so it was all down to me. 

Thankfully, my landlady put me in touch with the people in one of her other houses, who had some spare rooms available for September. I went along to meet them and immediately got the impression that it would be perfect.

It was a lovely place with a large, spacious social area right in the middle of the house. This time there would be no journeys into the dark, musty basement, trying not to spill the boiling hot cup of tea that I had just made. So I put my name down immediately and went with the knowledge that I could start looking forward to my final year at uni.

Photo by bruce mars from Pexels

 

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