Going to college is scary. Suddenly, you’re tossed into a new world where there are all of these expectations and built up anticipations that these will be the “four best years of your life.” Recruitment didn’t work out the way you wanted—the night before bid day you got the call. That perfect boy you’d been dating for the last two years of high school decided he actually wasn’t looking for anything serious and wants to keep his options open, taking you out of the picture. For the first time in your life you’re over 100 miles from home, and living in half a shoe box with a complete stranger. You start to wonder if the golden years of college mantra was all a fabrication.
I just wanted to tell you it is okay to feel this way. It’s okay if it’s been a few weeks since your parents dropped you off, and you’re still crying yourself to sleep most nights. It’s okay when it’s a Tuesday night and you find out you failed your first test of your college career. Then it’s finally the weekend and you find yourself going home again, and you figure you must be “colleging” all wrong. It’s a lonely time for you. Yeah you talked to the girl across the hall about how the community bathrooms suck or how you’re so tired of climbing up into your lofted bed, but where are the lifelong friends your parents spoke of? Where’s the perfect boyfriend you expected to find, maybe even thought you deserved the minute you got to college? Isn’t that how it always works in the movies?
College is emotionally draining. So much life happens in such a condensed period of time, and not everyone adjusts in the same ways. My freshman year wasn’t all sunshine and roses either, but I’m guessing it’ll happen for you a little like it happened for me. I found out the girl on my hall who gave me a cupcake the other day was in my biology class, and then a few weeks later I’m laughing with her on the floor of my dorm room until 2 am. Then one day I realized it’d been months since I cried or even thought about the boy who broke my heart when we parted ways for the summer. A month later I found myself in a completely different country, like going away to college wasn’t enough on its own, with 50 strangers ready to love on a people and a culture I knew little about. College stretches you. Comfort zones evaporate. I came back from that country with a family of 50 people. That new world I had found myself in at the beginning of the year was becoming my world, and now I lovingly call it my home. Before I knew it, I had only a few weekends left of my freshman year and there was no way I was spending any of them apart from my best friends. Springtime came and I wondered if campus had always been so pretty? At some point you’ll feel this too and you’ll stop to smile and laugh and blink. Somewhere among all the smiling and the laughing and the blinking you’ll find the year is over. And the best years of your life are just beginning.