Winter break. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel following a stressful week of finals, but after a few weeks of sitting at home or working at your old job, it can get a little tiresome.
A month of no responsibilities sounds like heaven until you realize how boring it can get. And a semester back at school with all of your friends sounds even better until you realize what inevitably comes with all of that fun: homework, classes, tests, and responsibilities.
Here are the 16 stages of returning to school after a break, as told by GIFS:
1. It’s winter break! You get home after a long, stressful semester and you start to appreciate the meaning behind “home sweet home.”
You’re reunited with your parents, your siblings, your friends, and your pets, and before long, it seems like you never even left for school in the first place.
2. You go back to working your high school retail job for some extra cash. Working the holidays can’t be as bad as you remember, right?
3. You soon discover that working retail during the holidays is exactly as bad as you remember and that well-deserved break starts feeling less and less like a break every day.
4. The weeks pass and you settle into a routine: work, friends and lounging around at home doing nothing.
5. You start to miss your dorm room or apartment and your friends back at school, and you especially miss the independence of being at school on your own.
6. You start thinking about all of the fun times you’re going to have next semester and get more and more excited about going back to school
7. But as your break starts coming to an end, that excitement wears off and dread starts settling in.
8. You finally get around to ordering your books and realize things aren’t looking good for you. They don’t really expect you to read all 20 of those textbooks, right?
9. It’s time to start packing and you tell yourself you’re only going to bring the essentials.
You didn’t end up using half of the things you brought last semester, yet here you are, bringing them all back again.