i'd never been told that before

I'd never been told that I was really nice. I have been told that I am very up front about things, but not that I am nice in the way I voice them. I reminded someone of home. Of a person who is understanding and loving. An old friend.
I got to talking with a fellow student after we'd worked on our class project together. We were venting our frustrations about our professor and group projects and such. We ended the conversation talking about how teachers and others give advice. Teachers that give terrible degrading advice because that is how they are, not because they want to tear us down. Classmates who hate how you are doing something, but won't tell you that to your face. Then she asked me where I was from and told me that I reminded her of people from her home town in Colorado. She said that she usually had a hard time opening up to people, and I told her that she had done a great job opening up to me. She said that I made it really easy and that I was a nice person. One who speaks her mind and lets you know her business, but who voices her thoughts in a nice way. She said that I was like the people in Colorado.
She said I wasn't like most Utahns. I then asked her what she thought other Utahans were like. She said they are not up front with their business, that they put on their pretty faces and are dishonest with you. I said that those kind of people are what I call "fake". They put up a perfect facade, but underneath they are someone completely different. They feel like they have to impress everyone and stop being themselves. I definitely understand this. When I was growing up I felt like an outsider in my group of friends, sometimes I still do. I felt like they were being nice to be because they didn't want to be openly rude in front of me, but that as soon as I was gone they were different. It was like they couldn't be their true selves with me around. I felt the same way; I didn't fee like I could be myself around them because they wouldn't like me. I was too busy trying to please all of them, I forgot to be myself. I have learned now not to care as much what others think of me and I try to find friends that love me for the way I am.
Why is it that my new classmates feel comfortable enough to open up about their whole lives within a month of meeting me? This is why college was one of my favorite steps of live. I was told I would have to come to school during summer, before my friends from home would come down to start the normal semester in the fall. At first I didn't want to, but it grew on me. I was excited to get out of the life I'd lived at home, the friends I had there, and start the next chapter. I knew no one that summer, but I instantly clicked with my roommates and the friends I made during those two months. It was like I was in a new world. I was free to be myself without the labels I'd placed on myself in my grade-school years. From then on I have continued to live with people I don't know from home and I don't hang out with them much either. In a way they are the friends of a past life, with some overlap into this new one, and they are stuck there.
I am still working to change the way I think about my life before college, but it's easier said than done in my case. I have changed a lot in college. I have become more blunt and I have realized that I love being myself, not matter what people think of me. I felt trapped in my grade-school days and now I am free again! No one knew who I was that summer; they were meeting me for the first time. No one knew what I was like at home and they were able to form an opinion of me. Sometimes I think that the people who know me the best are the ones I met after high school. Do those friends really know me? Will they ever know me like this?