“Do you have any friends left?” A PhD student confronted me with the question after I’d told them I was in my fourth year. It may seem like a callous thing to ask but to me it was unburdening. Yes, I still had some friends left, but it was a relief to tell the truth: fourth year is lonely. Half of my best friends graduated in June along with most people I knew in college. It’s like someone came in the middle of the night, took all my knives, one fork, both small plates, and a saucepan, and even though this happened a while ago, I forget every time until I open the cupboard and see all those things missing.

Starting fourth year, we were allowed into the MCR – only to face a feeling of not quite belonging there. The grads were all new, beaming with the excitement you get with novelty: they get a sense of a new start and a community waiting to form of people who have experienced the world, while we’re stuck in the same place, wondering where half our cutlery had gone. I felt both young and old at the same time. Fourth year is a sort of limbo where you’re officially a part of everything because you’re not really a part of anything anymore. All that time spent building a college presence, being in societies, going to Ents – none of that mattered anymore because no one was around to remember it.

“A year group once connected by an extensive network of friendships fractures when three quarters of it graduates”

When you’re a fresher, and everything is new, everyone wants to be friends with you, and you can take that for granted. You have to start building your networks from scratch and that’s okay because everyone else is, too. It’s different in fourth year. It’s starting all over again with half a structure already in place. The gaps that my graduated friends left cannot be filled so easily, and can hardly be patched through Tinder advertising: I’m looking for someone to convey the strong emotional relationship of the last three years in a two-minute hug when we bump into each other in the kitchen. I’m looking for someone to go barefoot jogging with me around John’s pitches, or someone to have DMCs about shared identity. People aren’t replaceable. Losing many at the same time leaves its mark.

For some reason, I thought the fourth-years would form some sort of cohesive unit: studying together, buttery-ing together, and doing games nights together because we’re old and we like to stay in, but it didn’t happen. The life force that is a group chat couldn’t bring together 30 or so fourth-years at Clare, not even after giving it a name. You can’t always shrink people together; the places where people used to stand still remain, invisible reminders that a year group once connected by an extensive network of friendships fractures when three quarters of it graduates. It took around five weeks for me to admit to myself I was lonely and couple more to admit it to my best friends, only to find they felt the same way. We couldn’t pretend we weren’t lonely anymore. It frustrates me to think we spent all that time being lonely separately when we could have been lonely together. We are embarrassed of loneliness as if it were a weakness as opposed to a valid emotion.

An Easter holiday schedule we can all get behind

To some, admitting to being lonely is admitting to having no friends, but that is a myth. It is possible to have plenty of friends and still be lonely. At a meeting for getting the most out of Cambridge, along with Cambridge Imposter Syndrome and FOMO, one of the issues mentioned was ‘loneliness through overwork.’ That phrase, raised by a fresher, no less, has been plaguing me since I heard it. It is the guilt that plagues you to do work at all times rather than having tea with a friend. Could my loneliness over losing my support network be compounded by overwork? The implication of loneliness is to be lacking something, but I am overrun with possibilities. It is too many unrealised opportunities that are causing my perceived loneliness, FOMO to the max. Reinforced by the common assumption that university is the best time of your life, I feel this immense guilt to be doing something to fill every second of my day, not just work but social as well. It’s not enough to be doing one thing at a time, studying has to be done with someone, even a 10-minute walk has to be done while talking on the phone with someone. In a technological age when we can do anything at anytime, anywhere, we feel as though we must. This burden to constantly do instead of simply being is increasing the pressure we already feel here. Being unoccupied is not the same as being lonely, and in fact, the problem might be being too full.

Tips to combat loneliness

– Read the University Counselling Service leaflet on loneliness.

–Talk to someone. I cannot emphasise how much admitting to my best friends that I was lonely helped. Not only did they confide the same thing in me, we made sure to check up on each other through the term.

– Making new friends is not always a solution because a lot of the time, loneliness can stem from feeling distant from the friends you have. It may seem like everyone else’s relationships are continuing on without you but a lot of the time they are just as busy.

– Although you can get a lot of support from friends online, face-to-face interaction can make a big difference. Take a few minutes extra to go to a cashier rather than self-service or pop into the plodge for a quick chat with the porter