It is your first night in your new room. You are eating takeout while a suitcase, cracked open, spills onto the floor in the corner. You are missing home and the fifth “ping” of the night from your loved ones telling you that they “miss you already” has just come through. To ease the quickly developing homesickness, you do what we all do: open TikTok.
The first video on your For You Page is a “Day 1 at Uni”, low-exposure, aesthetically pleasing vlog where the creator has 15 new friends and they are walking to Uncle Faouzi for a late-night ice cream. They look both settled into their new life and really happy. They look like they belong. This is incredible for them, but now, your night feels even lonelier. You start to feel like you have already failed at your transition to university. You wonder if you are the only one who missed the crash course on the right way to do this new chapter.
The truth is, feeling homesick and a little out of place may be uncomfortable, but it is necessary and completely normal. Your world is reshaping itself. This is a whole new environment with new people and a new version of you, one without the school uniform, the 10-year long friendships, or the teachers that felt like parents. Of course you feel out of tune. It is a developmental stage that you need to be honest with yourself about so that you can find your new voice.
The pressure of curating the perfect digital presence can stifle this fundamental growth spurt. You do not need to have the morning matcha, midday side-quests, late-afternoon gym sessions, and an early night-in after extensive journaling. While these vlogs may foster a sense of companionship and community for some, they also create a false sense of pressure for a seamless transition for the student sitting alone in their room. When we see a clip of friends laughing, what we do not see is the awkward “what are you studying?” and “where are you from?” conversations that preceded it. We see the final result, but we miss the messy process.
True transition does not happen in a two-minute voiceover. It happens in the small, brave moments when you finally say “hi” to the person sitting next to you in a lecture, even if your voice slightly cracks. It is when you bond over not knowing where the AE du Toit hall is or the collectively confused “huh?” during a challenging lecture. It is about celebrating the small, quiet wins like raising your hand to ask a question for the first time, or walking to Monastery with a new friend. These moments are not aesthetic, but they are signs that you are slowly finding your place here, even without an audience.
Uncle Faouzi will still be there tomorrow. For tonight, it is okay to be right where you are.
Visual: Esther Ndebele
