After graduating from high school, I was so excited to go to college. Neither of my parents attended college, so I was going to be the first person in my family to go to this mysterious place I’d seen represented only on television. I imagined college to be this world where everything was going to be amazing. I pictured myself with a roommate who was going to be my best friend. I pictured being in a sorority, and I pictured pulling all-nighters with friends writing essays and studying for exams. Most importantly, I pictured myself loving college. But that’s the thing about imagination—it doesn’t always represent reality.
In the real-life version of college at Sonoma State University, I had way more than one roommate, I didn’t have any college friends and my high school friends abandoned me when I needed them most. Sorority rush didn’t work out for me, and the only time I was awake all night was when my roommates were keeping me up with their bullying and harassment. What I thought was going to be a brand new start for me turned out to be a nightmare from hell.
In total, I had 15 roommates in three different housing situations. My first dorm experience was the worst. The eight girls I was living with didn’t care about me at all. Their only goal was to get drunk and high—all the time—and make my life miserable because I would not participate in their lifestyle.
It all took a hard, fast downhill turn during the weekend of my 18th birthday, and these two events are how I’ll always remember that birthday. On the night before my 18th, they stole a $70 bottle of Jack Daniels from a girl’s 21st birthday party—shortly after returning to the dorms, they got a phone call from the people whose alcohol it was. When they stopped by to pick up the alcohol, my roommates forced me to answer the door to return the nearly-empty bottle, plus the small amount of change they had been able to pool together to “pay” for the alcohol they’d already consumed. As if it wasn’t bad enough to send me out to deal with their problem, they kept me up the rest of the night being loud and banging on my window because they kept locking themselves out of the dorm over and over again.
The following night, on my actual birthday, they invited a bunch of older guys over who worked at the 7-11 across the street—to them, it was a way of getting free alcohol, cigarettes and weed. Because the guys were strangers, before they came over, my roommates hid kitchen knives throughout the dorm—so I knew this was a situation horrifying enough for me not to want to get involved in. Unfortunately, they had other plans for me—they stole my keys and locked me out of my room because they wanted someone in our dorm to stay sober in case something got out of hand, or someone from resident life came by. It was one of the most terrible nights of my life—my worst, I had thought—but little did I know, the worst was yet to come.
That weekend was the first time I realized that I was truly alone, and my roommates couldn’t care less about me. On top of that, my best friend from high school was supposed to have come visit for the weekend—but not only did she forget to wish me a happy birthday, she was a no-show.
Meanwhile, my family thought I was loving Sonoma. It had been my first choice school, and one I had been ecstatic to get into, because I wasn’t accepted until a week before high school graduation (by then, most people had already known for months what college they were going to). At the time, I thought it was finally happening: I was going to go to my dream school, graduate in four years and live the ultimate college life that I’d always heard of. I didn’t want my family to think I was having a different experience; that I had been too naïve to realize that my vision of college was one you’d only find on a scripted television show. It made me realize that the perfect college life I had always wanted wasn’t going to happen, and this destroyed me.
After the experience on my birthday, I wanted to move out—but even the thought of it scared me. Earlier in the semester, we’d had another girl who was living with us move out. She never said anything about it, and nobody saw her pack up and move out—one day, she was just gone. It wasn’t until after she had left that my roommates found out she had called residential life on them one night when they were partying loudly, which had gotten my roommates on probation.
Once they learned this, my roommates decided they wanted to punish her until her breaking point. They went out of their way to stalk her in the cafeteria, on the way to class, and anywhere they saw her on campus. They often followed her back to her new dorm, throwing insults and threats her way, and then they’d come back to our place and laugh about it. Seeing it happen to somebody else was terrifying, but thinking about it happening to me was worse—and I was afraid that if I left, they’d do the same thing to me.
When I was preparing for college, I did all the usual things, like learn how to do the laundry—but I never thought to prepare for a situation like this. I had never lived by myself before, let alone know how to get out of a situation. I felt like I didn’t have anybody to talk to—I didn’t want to ask my parents, because I didn’t want to admit to them that I was hating school, and I didn’t know where else to turn. I felt stuck, and didn’t know how to get out of this mess; I even convinced myself that this was the norm for living with roommates. Everybody has bad roommates at least once in their lives, right? I told myself it was my fault I was in this situation, and that I should have put in effort to blend in and join my roommates in the things they liked to do.
But as things got worse, I started to approach my breaking point.
When I came back for my second semester of college, I arrived a week before my roommates did—and what I walked in on still scares me to this day. The kitchen in our dorm had a giant walk-in pantry, and everything was white—the floors, the counters, the sink, the fridge. But when I walked into that kitchen, there wasn’t any white to be seen. All I saw was black.
There was food everywhere throughout the kitchen and the pantry. We had been gone for a month—during which time the ants had taken over. The worst part was the fridge—the university turns off the fridges throughout campus to save electricity, turning them on when students return from break. So when I opened the doors, there were piles of dead, frozen ants, mixed in with the live ants that had gotten in recently.
Since I was on campus early, there wasn’t really anybody on campus who could help me deal with the problem. I was at a loss as to what to do, and ended up finding a vacuum to clean the ants up myself. When my roommates finally showed up, I told them what had happened and showed them pictures. All they did was laugh and say they were glad they weren’t the ones to have to deal with it.
Soon after they returned, my roommates got into a fight with me about the food in our apartment. I had stashed all my food away in my own room, because they had been trying to use it. When I was making lunch in the kitchen one day, one of my roommates accused me of using her milk. Later that day, when they were all making dinner in the kitchen, they kept taunting me and blaming me for using the milk. Though I generally ignore them when they gang up on me, this time I decided to stand up to them. I told them that if I couldn’t use their milk, they couldn’t use my dishes—I grabbed a cup of tea that one of the girls had just made, poured it down the sink, and went into our shared living room.
Even though it might not have been the best way to deal with conflict, I was really proud of myself for having stood up to them for the first time all year. But never ones to let conflict end, my roommates threw my dishes into the sink, breaking them, and then grabbed a strobe light, shining it in my face in an attempt to get me to have a seizure. I tried to put up with this and ignore them as I continued my schoolwork, because I didn’t want them to think I was weak—but after thirty minutes of relentless torture, I finally went back to my room and shut myself in. It didn’t end there, though—they spent the rest of the night dialing my phone and banging on the door to my room.
It wasn’t even over the next morning. My roommates had pushed all the furniture in our dorm against my door, and covered the area with the broken glass from my dishes. I had to climb over it all to get out of my room. When I got back from class, they were all sitting at the table in our living space, with insults written about me on a whiteboard. I took it down, and threw the whiteboard marker at the table—and in retaliation, one of the girls hurled her cup of hot tea, drenching me in scalding liquid and missing my head by mere inches.
After all I had put up with that school year, this was the moment when I knew I couldn’t take it anymore and had to get out of there—fast. I turned around, walked out the door and headed straight to the office of residential life. They granted me an emergency move-out when I told them about my living situation, as they deemed my dorm an unsafe environment. It was the first time I had asked for help, and I was glad I did it.
Going through this experience taught me a lot. The most important thing I learned was that I can’t just sit around waiting for happiness to come to me. I have to take it upon myself to do what’s best for me, even if I’m scared of the unknown. I was trapped because I was too afraid to admit I needed help—at the time, I thought that admitting I was living a nightmare instead of having the time of my life at my dream school was admitting failure, and I didn’t want anybody to think that I couldn’t handle college. Yet I didn’t want to stay there, and I hated everything about it—it felt like nobody cared.
It took two and a half semesters at SSU, three different dorm rooms and 15 roommates altogether to make me finally realize that this was not the place for me. On November 6, 2013, I left school to go home. Since then, I’ve learned that dropping out of a 4-year university to head home doesn’t mean I failed at college—it just means that the college experience I always dreamed of having wasn’t going to happen for me at SSU, and leaving the school means I can now focus on finding it somewhere else.
Now, I’m attending the community college in my hometown, working as a daycare teacher at a local after-school program, and I have an incredible internship at a wedding magazine—all opportunities that wouldn’t have been available to me had I stayed at SSU. As it turns out, dropping out of college was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and instead of feeling alone and stuck, I am now so excited to start the next chapter of my life.
Plus, I’ll still be the first person in my family to go to—and graduate from—college… it just won’t be at Sonoma State.
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