When I came to college, I knew that I was going to learn a lot, but I didn’t realize that I would learn more than just what I intended to study. I thought that as a person, I had pretty much hit the peak of my development and changes, but I quickly realized that that will always be a lifelong process, not one that stops when you reach adulthood. Here are some things that I learned in college that I would never have imagined I would.
- I learned how to be confident.
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Confidence is something I always struggled with. Unless it was something an outside source told me I was good at, there was no way that I would ever believe myself to be good at it. But in college, I quickly realized that being confident didn’t mean being right. It didn’t mean being the best. It actually means being comfortable in the fact that you might be wrong, and being able to admit it in those times. It means that if you are not good at something, you own up to it. You get the help you need to become good at whatever it is. If you are confident in your ability to react and learn in any situation thrown at you, then there is really nothing that can stop you.
- I learned how strong I am.
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Not physically of course; if you know me you know that holding my cat proves difficult most days—but what I mean here is that I can overcome a lot of things. When I came to college, I didn’t realize that I would need to deal with a lot of things on my own. I came from a household of love and support, and as thankful as I am for that upbringing, it didn’t teach me how to cope with being alone. I learned how to seek help in the places where I needed it, and seeking that help didn’t make me weak by any definition of the word. It made me strong, and the more I needed to solve my own problems, the more tools I gained to help others with their problems. I learned that I am stronger than my anxiety and my depression, even when I don’t particularly feel like I am. Strength can mean a lot of different things, and I’m thankful that I can say with certainty that I am strong in the face of any challenges thrown at me.
- I learned how to love myself.
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Self-love is always something that I have struggled with, and I have often always found myself relying on the support of others when I felt weak. College taught me that even though I feel weak, I am not, and the things that I see as weaknesses are really just a part of me. I’ve always resented people who don’t struggle with their mental health because the feeling that you’re drowning in your own mind is hard to comprehend if you have never experienced it. I realized that my resentment was never that they didn’t understand that feeling. It wasn’t even directed at them. It was a resentment of myself for having something “wrong” with me that people didn’t understand.
My journey to self-love isn’t over, and I don’t know if it will ever be, but I learned that loving myself is important. And I learned that loving myself means embracing the things that might be embarrassing or difficult, and using them in ways that make me feel productive. If my anxiety means I no longer procrastinate, then how could it be a bad thing? If my depression can be channeled into my writing, how could a bad thing create something that other people enjoy reading? While I know I will still have days where my anxiety or depression (or both) will win, I know that I won’t let it stop me. I also know that it won’t ever stop me from loving myself since these mental disorders are a part of me, and self-love is about accepting the good with the bad and realizing that life is as beautiful as you make it.
- I learned that I am worth far more than I could have ever imagined.
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Self-worth was a hard concept to grasp because everyone always wants to be supportive. Everyone always wants to tell you that you are not your failures and that you are worth so much more than people think, but are you actually? For starters, your failures are as much of you as you are of them. I can admit that I am my failures, and they are me, but this isn’t a bad thing. From what I’ve felt and seen, our failures make or break us.
If you let them convince you that you won’t be something, then you will never be it. If you learn that something doesn’t work, at least you learned something and can use the knowledge you earned. I can tell you 100 times over that you are worth more for everything you go through, but until you get to the other side and see how far you have come, you will never believe it—I know I didn’t.
Throughout my whole time in college, I questioned everything. I didn’t take a step until I had talked it over with my advisor 18 times (Big shout out to Lisa here for actually reading all of those emails). But with everything I’ve been through, I’ve realized that the skills I have learned (both in the classroom and as a person) are accessible to me no matter where I go. I learned that if I can love myself, then certainly some other person can love me. I learned that if I can be a good friend, then certainly other people can be good friends back to me. Struggling will always make you question what you are worth, but in the end, you will always be worth more than you could even imagine.
- I learned how flexible and resilient I am.
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Being flexible is something I have always struggled with, but having to uproot everything in the wake of COVID-19 has taught me that I’m more flexible than ever before. I have always hated change, especially quick changes. When I like something, I don’t want that to ever stop. It can be proven through a lot of aspects in my life, but once I get comfortable, it is hard for me to suddenly need to readjust—or so I thought. If this had happened my first year of college, I think I probably would have lost my mind. However, after four years of studying and moving back and forth and watching crowds of people change day in and day out, I also began to change without even realizing it.
Change is not a bad thing. It can be upsetting, it can be overwhelming, it can even be uncomfortable, but it is not inherently a bad thing. This was a really important thing for me to learn, even though I didn’t realize I was even learning it. Without being flexible, you miss out on a lot of things. Whether it is moving your schedule around to grab dinner with your friend, or moving from building to building across campus, you might find that the good thing you thought you had, isn’t as good as the thing you are gaining. Sure, that can absolutely go the other way as well, but if you don’t try, you will never know.
Change comes at us fast sometimes, which is where the second half of this comes in. If you are flexible, you can also be resilient. It takes time and some practice for this piece, because it isn’t in every case that you will come across it, but being resilient is something that will always leave every opportunity open. If there is one thing that I’ve seen, it’s that rejections come at you a mile a minute in the publishing industry, whether it is a rejection from a job, a publication, or something else entirely, you have to be flexible to handle the changes, but you also need to recognize that one rejection doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Just because a professor tells you the one thing you thought you were good at, is actually not something you are that good at, doesn’t mean you should give it up. Being resilient, at least to me, means fighting for the things that you want, and as much as you need to be flexible and accept the things that are thrown at you, you also need to know when to fight for your ideas, and when to fight to get better so that the next time you go out for the job or send work to a publication, that rejection can turn into an acceptance.
In the end, college has taught me a lot about myself that I didn’t think was possible, and I’m so thankful for all the lessons that I have gotten over the past four years.