PEOPLE MY PEOPLE MY

PEOPLE MY PEOPLE MY

FINDING YOUR PEOPLE

By Maggie Tuer

For many years, as I’ve made my way through high school and university, I’ve felt as though I was on a quest to find ‘my people’. What started out as a general desire to be a part of a great group of friends quickly evolved into an incessant need to surround myself with individuals who were just like me. This specific group came with an extensive list of criteria: outdoorsy, hardworking, funny, down-to-earth—with new adjectives being added all the time. It was always my belief that when I met these particular individuals, I would truly have met ‘my people’—and I would thrive. As you can imagine, when I arrived at Queen’s four years ago with this naïve idea of who my new crew would consist of, I was disappointed. Though I did meet many fun and interesting people, I found myself holding them all to impossible standards, mentally checking off boxes in my head when someone exhibited a quality that I believed we shared, but never finding enough commonalities to satisfy me. As a result, I felt that I lacked the support to pursue my passions and grow into the person I aspired to be, and I seriously considered transferring to a university that was more ‘me’. I have struggled with this irrational need to find ‘my people’ throughout my entire university experience, and while I have certainly not moved past it completely, I feel as though I have finally gained some clarity on the issue. What I have learned is that when we spend all of our energy

searching for people to encourage our interests and validate our feelings, it reinforces in us a fear of standing out and being true to ourselves. It seems so simple looking back now, but for me it took a sometimes-tortuous journey to arrive at this painfully obvious truth: we should do what feels right for us and do it unapologetically. And we should do this regardless of who we surround ourselves with.

“We should do what feels right for us and we should do it unapologetically.”

I am not saying that we must all befriend people with values that completely conflict with our own -- that would cause some problems. But I think we need to push ourselves to invest time in people that do not immediately check off every box of the best friend list. Because it is these relationships that provide us with the space we require to grow into our own selves, rather than simply a mould of somebody else. In my case, after bouncing around many friend groups, I now live with a group of girls who arguably could not be more different from each other; and yet I have never felt more like myself. It was this realization that led me to my new philosophy: when you find yourself in a room full of people with whom you struggle to find a single point of commonality, and yet you can still remain content and confident with who you are, that is when you truly thrive.