There is no joy in loneliness. We need change.

“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life,” wrote Yale student Marina Keegan, before dying in a car accident.

The piece goes on to address the need for a sense of belonging. Keegan found it at Yale, but there is also room to find it at Ike.

Maybe it’s the lack of windows in the building, maybe it’s the lack of junk food or maybe it’s the construction students face every single morning. Ultimately, we have apparently become a school reveling in our antisocial tendencies, dividing ourselves from one another and embracing the color black as a universal symbol of our teen angst.

We are a student body bursting at the seams full of over 2000 unique individuals. We scrub every other day; complain about the emptiness of the school store in unison and carry the relentless stress that is juggling homework.

Students may post or tweet and claim they want to leave the school in their past and move to faraway lands like New York and California. The yearning to explore the unfamiliar is understandable, but students can tend to neglect the present in search of the future.

I’m just as excited as anyone to go away to college, but I am not afraid to admit I’m scared to lose the opposite of loneliness that I’ve found here.

Each student is different and diverse, but there is this undeniable feeling that we are all in this together.

Walking down the hallways doesn’t strike fear into my heart because I know I share at least a few things in common with other students. I don’t see boundaries, I see us as a collectivist group of individuals traveling in a million different directions. But for now, we are all here and that shouldn’t be neglected.

Maybe it’s attending a football game and chanting in the student section. Maybe it’s discussing passions in a club. Maybe it’s simply hanging with friends.

We all have room to discover an opposite of loneliness here.

“We are so young. We are so young,” Keegan wrote. High school shouldn’t be the place to make an antisocial army of cynics.

Looking forward to my senior year I’m excited, scared and humbled to be part of such a great community. I don’t want to lose what I’ve found here and hope student’s take time to explore the extensive opportunities and unique individuals here, so they can feel this way too.

Ike is awkward, the rooms are weirdly divided, the Wi-Fi blocks way too much and the parking lot is a mess. But if students give it a try and make some real connections here, something beautiful will emerge that will stay with them longer than the scent of the school on their clothes.