When we’re in middle school and high school, we’re given the impression that college is the end goal. Everything you do leads up to what college you plan to go to and what you study. If you’re anything like me, you focus so hard on college you forget that it’s just a small chapter in the huge thousand-page story of your life.
To be honest, that hasn’t hit me quite as hard as it has now that I am starting my junior year of college. I have friends I met as freshmen and sophomores who are graduating this year, and I, myself, am halfway done with the thing I have dedicated countless hours to panicking and stressing about. It really puts into perspective how short the chapters in our lives really are.
I like to think of it like a train station, and the important parts of our life that we are excited for, scared for, or indifferent to are just stops along the road. We get off the train and experience whatever it is that’s waiting for us, and then we get back on the train and continue.
People put a huge emphasis on the high school and college years being the peak of your life, and everything just going downhill from there. High school was never the end goal, college is never the end goal, and our future jobs aren’t the end goal either.
We, as humans, were never meant to obsess and focus so hard on the chapters or the train stops. To think that these four years of our lives define us or become who we are is quite silly.
Of course, college is the time to make mistakes and learn from them to grow into well-rounded adults in society, and it’s an important time to discover who we are as people; it is not a time we are meant to dwell or live in.
Everyone experiences college differently and grows in different ways because none of us are on the same journey, but it’s important to let whatever these four years are be. It’s simply just another lesson to be learned, not a state to live in.
Enjoy it while it lasts, but remember that there is so much more to come in life, and so much more happiness and joy to find in every single part of our lives. Our peaks are ebbing and flowing and never concrete.