At the beginning of the quarter, I wrote an article that honestly may have been a way for me to lowkey trash UCLA without having to say it. I was having a very hard time fitting in, sure I had found a friend or two to get lunch with, but overall I was really regretting with every fiber of my being having chosen this school. So, yeah, I wrote about not finding college to be like the movies as a way to express how much I hated it here.
Now, this time I’m not going to have any underlying messages, I’m just going to tell it how it is. I think I finally found my place on this campus. I’m not counting down the days until I can go home. I’m not trying to fill every spare moment with some sort of activity to distract myself from the fact that I chose a school that I might hate. And I think a lot of it had to do with coming to terms with the fact that there is no picture-perfect college experience, it really is just what you make of it.
The main thing I did to change my perception of things this quarter was to redefine what I consider “fun.” When I realized that having “fun” doesn’t have to mean going out or having a million different friends, I started to notice how much happier I was. For me, it is fun to go to the coffee shop with my friends and pretend we’re going to study when we all know the only thing we will get done is gossiping. I find it fun to walk aimlessly around Westwood and go into little shops and restaurants that I didn’t even know existed. I find it fun to sit in my dorm room and read a book with no one else around. Noticing that little things are what actually make me happy was probably the most valuable lesson I learned all quarter.
If I were to reflect on this quarter with one simple sentence I would say, that it’s the things we usually overlook that will make us the happiest. It has now come to my attention that one main reason I was unable to enjoy the last year here was that I had set the expectations for myself so high. Anything that didn’t fit into this very specific realm was automatically overlooked no matter how much I enjoyed myself. So to fall quarter I would say this, thank you for bringing attention to everything I kept missing. I really was my own biggest obstacle.