With a “Good luck!” and a final pat on the back, they were gone.

Some parents cry when their kids go to college. Some make an embarrassing scene and later deal with an “empty nest.” My parents high-fived each other and drove off, leaving me standing in the middle of a pile of everything I owned.

I fought back panic. My parents helped me move the big stuff in but when that was finished, the message was clear. Adult life starts here, move yourself in.

I was on the road of becoming my grown-up self, which happened to be located on Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara.  The drive from childhood to this turning point had taken exactly two hours, the same amount of time it takes to drive from my hometown of Los Angeles to Santa Barbara.

As their taillights disappeared, I kept a stony face. I didn’t want them to know that I felt like they didn’t love me. My roommate’s parents were moving her in. How was I supposed to carry several boxes down a hill? Who was going to watch my stuff outside while I hauled the trash bag of shoes filled with platforms and boots down the stairs? I didn’t know anyone.

My new roommate and I had briefly emailed over the summer in a last minute ditch attempt to find an apartment, and here she was in real life. I’d never been forced to meet someone so quickly before. I was living with a total stranger. It was an odd feeling.

The next day when I went to my first class, I was the first one there. I sat in the corner and waited for the rest of my classmates. They came in five minutes later as a chattering pack.

When had these alliances formed? For the first time in my memory, I had no one to sit with.

Later in the day when my roommate and I met up, she started telling me stories of all the new people she had met and befriended. I felt left out, like an anti-social hermit who was failing at making friends on the first day of the rest of our lives.

Of course, that was just my melodramatic opinion for the first few months.

But at the time I felt that the first day had obviously been a test, and I had failed. I failed at college and possibly at life. I couldn’t make friends and I didn’t know why, I had made friends at my high school.

How could I make everyone understand that at home people knew me, at home people thought I was funny?

When I came home I curled up in a ball under my bed sheets, hugged a pillow, and cried.

College was suddenly happening, ready or not. Apparently, I was not.

Eventually everything did turn out all right at college, but it didn’t happen overnight.

There was a lot to get used to, like learning how to make myself go to class when no one cared if I didn’t show up, or how to stay home and let everyone accept the fact that I hate, hate, hate Isla Vista during Halloween despite its reputation “Best.Halloween.Ever!”

I don’t know why it took me so long to adjust. At home in LA, I’d felt I was so ready to be at college that I would pass out if I had to spend one more minute with my parents. But once I got to Santa Barbara, it took me longer than I had ever expected to be comfortable.

When you start something new, you will have terrible, horrible, no good days and seemingly endless moments of loneliness when you think you’re screwing up your life and you’re too awkward for anyone to like.

But you just keep going and one day you will wake up, and everything has, for the most part, turned out all right.

You’ll have plans for the day and people know you, and when you’re window-shopping alone that’s okay too.

After you can go eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner, ’cause you’re a grown-up now.