My dad loves to remind me to hold on to my childhood friendships. Whenever I’d recount the happenings of a hangout I’d just come from, he’d smile and confess how he regrets not maintaining his own youthful relationships. He acknowledges that college is the best time to explore, reinvent yourself, and make new friends, but always, without fail, he tells me that the friendships you had prior would forever be the best.

In my case, I’ve always struggled with maintaining friendships. I’ve had the unfortunate luck of being the last resort—the last person left to talk to in school at 6 p.m. before our parents could pick us up, the last person asked to hangout on the weekend, or the last person to be let in on plans or secrets. The fear of missing out was all-consuming.

Choked by a sudden need to hold on to what little I had, I had changed myself to better suit the people I was surrounded by, like a chameleon in survival mode adapting to its environment. I believed then that I needed to change myself to somehow elevate my importance to the group, to be included and perhaps even prioritized, and to quash the feeling of inauthenticity and self-hatred that had begun to fester.

Predictably, this codependency had drained me to the point that I dropped the charade and withdrew from my relationships. That is, until I entered highschool, and I met a girl who embodied everything I wasn’t—unabashedly herself and uninterested in conforming to the class norm despite being the new girl. I hated her for it, and it was evident in the fact that we hardly spoke that year. But by the next, my hatred had grown into a quiet admiration and uneasy jealousy of her resilience.

Ever so gradually, I spoke to her. She spoke to me. We developed a shallow friendship initially built on being on the outskirts of the friend group that dominated the class. As the relationship deepened, I learned that she was actually not the lone girl I perceived her to be; she had many friends—they were just scattered across the country. And weirdly enough, I didn’t feel pressured to compete. I was her school friend, she had other friends in other aspects of her life, and that was okay. It was an understanding and closure I wouldn’t have gained if I hadn’t made the mistake of believing that friends had to be the people close by.

She and I are on very different paths of life today. She works part time while she juggles her international online schooling, often traveling back-and-forth between Baguio and Laguna, while I dorm close to my university in the city, worrying about assignments, internships, and thesis, until I go home to the province on the weekend. Still, if our hectic schedules permit, we’ll reunite every once in a blue moon.

I am 21 years old now and on the brink of my senior year of university. I keep learning throughout my stay here, as I should anyhow, yet I’m not referring to academics. What I discovered in college is that being yourself authentically is what will get you the best friends that you won’t feel pressured to change for in exchange for camaraderie. And you won’t get just one friend, but many, and not through the same situations, nor for the same reasons.

You’ll make friends by asking to sit together in a class where you know no one and it turns into being each other’s guaranteed groupmate for every project; by taking on random extracurricular classes or organizations and bonding over the stress of completing tasks you signed up for in the first place; or by going outside and partying on a Friday night with people who’ll eventually ask you to hang out on the weekend.

In college, you’ll do a lot of branching out on your own. And in doing so, you’ll find your people, the constants through choice, not circumstance. And yes, you’ll disagree, you’ll fight, you’ll mourn the differences, and you might even completely drift apart, but simultaneously, you’ll look back and think how fortunate you are to have found people who you can be yourself around, even if it doesn’t always suit them perfectly.

I myself have been fortunate enough to experience all of the above. But every so often, when I feel a little spread out and disconnected, I crave a connection that knows every aspect of me as a whole, and I’ll hit up my childhood friend. We’ll go out and have coffee or stay-in and binge watch-and-eat, and afterwards, I’ll tell my dad all about it.