Whenever I mentioned college as a young girl, my mom would get a misty look in her eyes and say, “I wish I could go back to college.” I’d make a face, because who on earth would want to go back to school? Then my mom would begin waxing poetic about the joy of learning and broadening your mind, and I’d tune her out as best I could. As I started applying to colleges, the phrases “I would love to go back to college,” “college is the best four years of your life,” and “aren’t you so excited?” would bounce around in my brain as I bit my nails, restlessly tossing and turning while I tried to go to sleep.
It wasn’t just my parents, it was everyone around me. Society drummed it into me that college was amazing. College was a game-changer. I was going to love it. Life would never be the same. In the months leading up to move-in, I experienced bouts of deep anxiety that transformed into excitement because my life was about to change and open up, and then that feeling morphed into dread, then happiness, back and forth like some demented game of ping-pong.
And then I was at college. Mythical, magical College with a capital “C.” The first few weeks went by in such a whirl that I didn’t really have time to process anything. But as time wore on, I started having doubts. I wasn’t having the best time of my life. I was lonely, and scared, and anxious. I didn’t feel like a radically new and better person. I wasn’t meeting my best friends. I was just going through the motions, struggling to form connections and further isolating myself when things didn’t go perfectly. I didn’t tell anyone I was struggling because I wasn’t supposed to be struggling. College was, unquestionably, The Place. I mean, it was College, for crying out loud, so something had to be wrong with me, right?
Well, no. Turns out that people romanticize the past. Time drapes a beautiful, glimmering sheen over the salad days of higher education. I was talking to my mom about how hard it was for me to adjust, especially since I had been groomed to expect immediate gratification from college, and as I talked, the sheen began to disappear and she told me some of the not-so-glamorous aspects of her college life. But adults can push those moments aside because they’re removed from the situation now. The people who are living in it just can’t do that. We can’t look at the big picture, not really.
(I searched “perspective” and that’s the picture that came up. It’s a little weird, but I’m about to use a staircase metaphor in a few paragraphs, so might as well.)
It’s hard to realize that college might not be the best four years of your life. Intellectually, I knew that I wasn’t going to immediately be having the greatest time ever; that’s just not who I am. But I still felt like I should be, and that by missing home and my high school friends, I was a failure.
I’m not a failure, though. I’m a human being. And college is hard, y’all. I’m still learning that I don’t need to beat myself up because I’m having trouble like a normal person. Sure, some people might actually love college right off the bat, and good for them. However, I don’t think most of us do, and that’s okay. It’s hard to accept that when everyone and everything around us screams, “COLLEGE ROCKS!!!!!” We need to learn to be gentler on ourselves. Most people don’t make friends overnight. Most people don’t have a smooth transition to college. Most people have trouble. And that’s okay. Growing pains are a part of life, and we need to embrace them instead of trying to hide them away. College is a formative experience for many young people, yes. But it’s not the end-all, be-all.
This isn’t to say that college sucks. It doesn’t, I promise. I’m not bashing on college in the slightest; I’m bashing on the false, perfect idea of college that’s been implanted in our brains. College is pretty cool. You’ll have independence and freedom that you initially won’t know what to do with. You’ll meet like-minded peers and not-like-minded peers and you’ll learn from both of them. You’ll make connections with wise professors in tweed jackets who grade papers way differently from your teachers in high school. You’ll read really confusing books and won’t get them until it suddenly clicks, and then you’re like, “I am the smartest person in the room” even when you clearly are not. I’ve made some wonderful friends and I’ve done things I would never have dreamed about of a few short months ago, and I’m just a wee freshman still learning to navigate these new waters. It only expands from here.
Freshman year of high school, my English teacher, Mr. Justice (shoutout to Westminster! #highschoolforever), drew a line all the way across the whiteboard and marked off a tiny section of it a little less than a quarter of the way across. “This,” he said, “is high school.” That infinitesimal chunk of the line was high school, which had loomed so large in our minds for so long that it seemed like a behemoth. “Perspective,” he said sagely. He said a lot of other inspiring things, but the point was this: high school is a tiny portion of your life compared to the whole, even though it may seem overwhelming at times. Same with college. It’s important and exciting, but it’s not your whole life. Keep that in mind the next time you feel discouraged. (Besides, do you really want to be one of those people who peaked before they hit 25?)
In college, you take your first steps on the really long, weird, confusing and beautiful Staircase of Life™, and it’s okay if you stumble a little bit, because you can always get back up.