Michael Gabriel ’28 is currently undecided on his major, but he enjoys history and the sciences. Here at The Flat Hat, he is one of the Graphics Editors and contributes an issue of his Willy and Mary comic almost every edition. He is a big baseball fan, likes the outdoors and is always happy to talk to anyone about anything. Contact him at mdgabriel@wm.edu.
When I got to this school, I didn’t really have a choice. Aside from a handful of people, I knew no one. I think it would have been easy to just keep to myself, eliminate distractions and focus on schoolwork, but I just couldn’t do that. I wanted to meet people.
Like most freshmen, it started with my dorm. My roommate and I met everyone on our floor during orientation. We all would go on random side quests to Wawa or Goodwill, talking about our stories and where we came from and making connections. Then we met the people on the other floors, and the process repeated.
As the weeks went by, friends I made in the dorm introduced me to people from other dorms. Next thing you know, I was traveling across campus to play Spikeball with a completely different hall of people.
There were also people I met by sheer happenstance. We were in line together at Caf, both showed up to a club interest meeting (for a club that neither of us would ever join) or maybe were in a lab together.
By the end of my freshman year, I had a pretty random web of friends all across campus. I wasn’t buddy-buddy with everyone, of course. There were some people I was closer with than others, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t sit with any of them at Caf or walk with them to class. It was just nice to have some familiar faces in my day to day.
When we got back to campus this year, I was sitting at Sadler with two people I had met in completely different places last year. It was kind of like that feeling when you see your grandparents from both sides together for the first time. Worlds collided. I introduced the two to each other, and immediately one of them asked the other guy, “So here’s the million-dollar question: how do you know Michael?” It was funny, but it made me realize just how many people I had met in my first year.
They say he who knows everyone knows no one. That was a saying that always bothered me.
I’m not writing this to boast that I know a lot of people. A lot of people struggle with conquering their social anxiety on the regular, including myself. The key is that you have to seek discomfort. You have to get past all the supposed little awkward things in life that we stress over. It doesn’t hurt to break up awkward silence, it doesn’t hurt to compliment someone on their jersey and it sure doesn’t hurt to just say hi to someone in the hall.
Yes, a lot of the time the person might just look at you strangely and dig their head deeper into their phone, but all it takes is one little interaction to spark a relationship that lasts.
I don’t really know what drove me to sit down and write this piece. My dad always joked that my mom could start a conversation with anyone. Maybe I get this drive from her. I don’t know.
Go say hi to someone. I’ll leave it at that.
