When I told my high school friends last year I was applying early decision to a school in the Midwest, their eyebrows flew off their faces. And when I told them I’d applied without ever setting foot on campus, their eyebrows somehow managed to reach greater heights.

People in my hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey, rarely leave the East Coast. For the most part, a faraway move means Boston or Virginia. I was one of six people in a class of 173 who moved more than 300 miles in any direction (and to my recollection, I was the only one whose first experience on campus was move-in day). I suppose the reason why the vast majority of us cling so close to home is because we live in a bubble. My high school was comprised of people with a fiery liberalism stemming from universally difficult lives. We had surrounded ourselves our entire lives with people just like us — poor minorities with poor minority issues — but we were distinctly aware that life beyond the confines of our collective safe space wouldn’t be half as comfortable. But as I head into this vast and vastly unfair world, I am forced to confront its realities head-on.

College is, for myself and my classmates, our first taste of a wealthier and whiter America. The Midwest is an exemplification of that. Thus, my decision to apply ED to Northwestern, a school I knew only from glossy catalogs and a “Devil Wears Prada” reference, was all the more surprising to everyone around me. And despite my initial excitement, I was terrified of what my time here would be like. I had read stories about low-income students starving their way through elite colleges without a support system, their poverty (both at home and on campus) locked behind their lips like a dirty secret. My friends warned me of this in their own way, teasing me about spending what little money I’d have on Vineyard Vines and Patagonia.

But I still wanted a change. Until I moved over 700 miles away, I’d never really challenged myself by leaving my own safe space of Jersey City. And I was starting to realize I wanted a challenge; I needed to broaden my horizons. In the time I’ve been at NU, I’ve already had to figure out how to survive without laundry detergent on a bank account of about $3 while pretending I’m “just not feeling Andy’s tonight.” I stood up, seemingly alone, when the Diversity TND facilitator asked those who had lived in poverty to stand.

My experience here has been suffused with loneliness at times. In light of all the insecurities of being low-income, retreating into silence again was instinctual for me, this time in regards to the fact that it would take my parents almost four years to pay off a year of tuition here on their own. I’d done this before, and it only seemed natural that I’d do this again in a place I barely knew with people I thought wouldn’t quite understand — even though my first interactions with the Class of 2020 were fellow students at a summer program designed specifically for the type of people I grew up with. Unfamiliarity feels unsafe, regardless of how similar the stories that surround you are.

The conservative rhetoric around safe spaces warps their original sociological definition. A safe space is formally defined as a place to have ideas challenged, changed and compromised without fear of assault, yet is commonly misconstrued as a place where thought-provoking (or conservative) ideas are shut down by fits of blind (liberal) rage. When I refer to Jersey City as a safe space, I recall an expansion of my social awareness and a healthy dialogue about questions the world posed for us students of color. Before I left, I would speak about the necessity of safe spaces out of fear that, once I left mine, I would not find another.

Coming to NU, I am especially thankful that such safe spaces still exist for me. Students like me face countless problems at NU: the near-daily struggle of affording basic necessities and luxuries so small they’re taken for granted, the even more incessant internal battle over whether or not we’re socially or academically deserving of a place here, the pangs of isolation. It is therefore all the more important to find people to relate to. It’s important, too, to find people who might change my mind about the way I view myself.

It is vital to have safe spaces. And as someone who bound himself to a school he never visited, I am all the more grateful I have already found them just weeks into my freshman year at NU.

David Guirgis is a Medill freshman. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.