I loved my freshman year, don’t get me wrong – but I would be lying if I said there weren’t times when I felt completely lost in who I was and what I wanted to get out of my four years here. After taking some time to reflect on my year, I was able to collect my thoughts, piece them together, and learn from them. The emotions and struggles I had last year felt so personal. I soon realized this summer that although it felt like no one around me was having these thoughts and feelings, in reality, after talking and reflecting with my friends, I now realize that we were all going through our own battles. My hope is that my personal experiences and realizations will help others as they embark on such a formative and influential journey: college.
People often say when you embark on the college experience that you learn more about yourself than you ever have; you experience more types of people, and many times people tell us that it is where we will find friends they call the “good ones”. They tell us about all the free time we will have to explore what we love to do. They tell us that we will learn how to take care of ourselves and live alone, and most importantly how to keep ourselves company. While all this may be true, what they forget to tell you when you go to college is the strength required of you stay close to everything you have ever been and ever learned.
Every lesson about kindness, gratitude, and patience won’t really become crucial until that very moment when you step onto that campus. What they fail to tell us before we go to college is how easy it is to become wrapped up in other people’s beliefs and ways, so much that by the summer you don’t even recognize yourself. Looking back at freshman year my biggest regret is compromising who I am and what I believe to please the people around me, because at the moment not inviting that one girl doesn’t seem like a big deal, but inclusion has always been your biggest priority and before you know it you are the person excluding people. They don’t tell you when you go to college that you will put so much pressure on yourself to make the perfect friends that you will change yourself so much to become their perfect friend instead. Each mistake made turns into routine and before you know it you are doing things you said you never would.
While change is good and normal, we must keep in mind when we go to college that morals don’t change, morals stick through and they are what make us who we are. All the lessons you were taught by the person who took the time to shape you as a person, those matter the most. Each time we sacrifice a moral to fit in, we get farther from meeting those people they told us about, the “good ones”. If you are anything like me, know that feeling things deeply and caring deeply isn’t wrong and isn’t dramatic, and the people who tell you that, are struggling themselves. So feel your emotions full hearted because if you don’t, you won’t be able to feel others either. At times it will feel like you are crumbling. But what I have learned is that if you don’t have that strength when you get there, to full heartedly be yourself, to be the kind one and the one who is different, then you must find the strength. You must lean on the ones you know and when things get hard remember the ones you want to make proud, show your mom that she did a good job, that you value the kindness she taught you to have since you were born. If you are lucky enough as I was, you will meet one or two people who truly care to know you, and those are the people who will stick by your side as you find yourself. Cherish them, enjoy them, and know that even when it does not seem like it, someone cares.
If there comes a time when you are alone, know that loneliness is only a feeling, and at the end of the day you must be happy with yourself. Though at times it will feel like you are crumbling, in the end, when you are a senior in college, with those people they call the “good ones”, you will be happy, and that it will all have been worth it.
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