Opinion: OWeek fails introverts

It’s a week of frenzied partying, instant friendships and utter mayhem. The louder prospered, while people like myself — who you may call timid, shy or quiet — drowned in an effort to fit in.

While many remember making the best friends and best memories that dictated their life at Western University during their frosh week, for me it sucked.

I lived in Ontario Hall. The girls on my floor clicked instantly, since many of them were from the same town. With the friend group already established, they welcomed in their roommates and that was that.

You can call me antisocial, or dub me with social anxiety. I think I'm just quiet and require time to open up. 

For me, approaching a group of seven girls who instantly became friends was daunting.

And I'm sure I’m not the only person who felt this way.  

You could have shown up late to move-in. Maybe you didn’t have the same style or sense of humour as your floor or maybe your interests didn’t align.

Some of us were just unlucky.

And if you didn’t fit in at the beginning, odds were, your week wasn’t going to get much better.

Cheering, screaming and rallying sounds fun in theory, but when you’re alone, not as much. Personally, I can only muster up a fraction of others' enthusiasm and I felt overshadowed by the groups around me that were yelling and having fun. With events centred on being loud and generating energy, they never gave introverts the opportunity to be themselves and find others like them.

We were just trying too hard to fit in.

But we never really could. With the loud and the rowdy catching most of the attention, the quiet are easily overlooked, and at no fault of anyone. Sophs easily connected with the extroverts of the pack and while they created a family, I became the awkward cousin who tagged along because I had nowhere else to go.

With events like cheer-offs, concerts and talent shows the people who were willing to put themselves out there thrived. With crowds and yelling, they weren't events to meet people and make friends but events you went to in predetermined groups. I didn't have a group, and I didn't know how to make one within these occasions, which ultimately limited my growth. 

I spent so much of OWeek and my first year trying to fit in with the extroverted majority that I never realized there were people like myself and OWeek events catered to us like movie nights and board game hours. The fact is, they weren’t well advertised, and people didn’t talk about them so odds of us introverts catching wind of them were slim.

Overall, I’m sure many people had fun at Frosh this year and I’m genuinely happy they did. But my frosh sucked, and if yours did too then just know you’re not alone.

And trust me, it gets better.