During my first semester of freshman year, I grappled with the usual challenges students this age face — making new friends, balancing school work with social life, managing your time without parental supervision — but the challenge I found most harrowing was accepting the realization that my childhood was over. As much as I enjoyed meeting new people and getting to experience the freedom of adult life, a small part of me was constantly missing my family, my friends, and the simple pleasures of my youth. I spent more time than I’d like to admit crying over my childhood friends and experiences and feeling unfulfilled by the new ones that filled my life.
I had heard that getting involved makes the college campus feel smaller and that the busier you are the less time you have to grow homesick, so I went to Virginia Tech’s club fair, GobblerFest, looking to join anything I could think of. I always enjoyed babysitting and working with kids, so I signed up for College Mentors for Kids, a club that pairs you with a local elementary school student to mentor in weekly meetings. I reasoned that, at the very least, this club would give me a reason to leave my dorm room. However, I soon found that it benefited me in more ways than I imagined.
Amidst a million superficial concerns of stressing that I wasn’t making enough friends, worrying about boys, and comparing myself to girls my age on social media, I found that playing freeze-tag on the drill field and making cut-out pumpkins with six-year-olds helped pull me back to earth. College can feel suffocating at times, since you are constantly surrounded by people your age, so spending an hour or two with a kid who didn’t care if she got marker on her outfit or if her hair grew tangled from cartwheeling helped break the echo chamber and remind me that there is a world beyond my college campus. Not only that, but it allowed me to get back in touch with the parts of my childhood that I was mourning, and it made it that much more enjoyable when the hour was up and I returned to the adult life of freedom that had seemed so overwhelming before.
I know not everyone enjoys working with children as much as I do, but even just allowing myself to engage in activities that most people deem “childlike” made the transition into adulthood less jarring. Now, even when it’s not my day to mentor, I choose to make time for activities that pull me away from my collegiate concerns by spending time outside, drawing, and watching tv shows and movies from my childhood. I think it’s important to remind yourself that getting older and entering a new chapter doesn’t mean you have to abandon the joy of the old one, and that is exactly what College Mentors for Kids and the students involved helped me realize.