• Comfort.

I love comfort.Truth is, we all do at Duke. At first, Duke is SO uncomfortable. O-week, everyone is going around asking the same thing: “What’s your name?” I think regardless of how that starts, everyone seems to seep into this pit of “similarity”. I love my friends. I love everything about them (lol yes that includes their messy tendencies). Something I came to understand is that friendships in Duke are very segregated in ways that I feel most of us are aware of i.e. by color, socioeconomic status, etc. Yes go ahead and gasp and look around like you had no idea, but the truth is most of us already know. Yes, I knew, but I wasn’t ashamed because comfort is something everyone should know. Comfort is an important part of mental well-being, especially somewhere like Duke.

Change.

Change has always been a demon in my opinion.

I never understood why I hated it SO MUCH. (I actually still do A LOT.) I finally figured out, sometime after moving for the first time, that my reason for hating change so much is because I hate discomfort even more. I think this is why while at Duke, I picked a community of people who caused me as much comfort as possible.

My Girls.

Realization. Or at least something along those lines. For most of my life, I’ve stayed in the same house, in the same city, with the same friends, going to the same places. Most could say my life was just very routine. As I spoke about earlier, I hate change, so I felt no need to do anything different. It wasn’t until Sophomore Fall that I got to the realization that I needed different surroundings. I didn’t understand how important it was to have yourself surrounded by different ideas and personalities. For the most part, I actively sought out people who were different from me i.e. those whose backgrounds weren’t necessarily the same or who looked the same as me. It worked lol! I met some amazing people who were very different from me. I broke out of my small bubble, right? Wrong. I still knew I was only myself truly around those who looked like me. I still knew I would only talk about my true thoughts and feelings with those who thought like me. Somehow after all that effort, I’d still keep myself in my little tunnel of comfort.

MOXIE

Bloop. That’s literally my first word about Moxie because everything that I thought to be true suddenly was changed. I became a Moxie during a really hard time in my life i.e. Organic Chemistry 2. I never expected myself to be sharing things, very personal things, with strangers who I didn’t know very well at all, except Destiny. It was so scary. Out of my comfort zone. Everything I had hated in my life. Then we somehow got to NYC,another change that I hated just as much at first. Slowly these people I’d just met became those I told some of my deepest secrets to. I’ve gotten to know some strong, beautiful, vibrant women who are completely different than me, and I’m comfortable. I feel like throughout this entire experience I’ve changed something that I’ve been so avoidant of. I guess what I have to say is change isn’t that bad, diverse friend groups are amazing, and these women are changing my world.