As the month of July is more than halfway over, many 17 and 18 year olds will leave home for the first time within the next month. While some may live in a college dorm just a few hours from the place they grew up, and others move across the country from the town they know all the back roads to, there’s no doubt that this transitioning time in the lives of young adults produces many mixed emotions. While many of us are filled with excitement as we begin a new and defining chapter of our lives, where we get to decide who we are without boundaries or requirements, many of us are also filled with fear: fear of the unknown, fear of failure, and fear growing up. While I am excited to see what the next phase of my life has to offer, unlike most of my peers my most prominent emotion regarding college is fear. Instead of counting days until move-in with excitement, I feel like the days are passing too quickly and I dread that each day is one day closer to leaving behind the comfort of the small town I claimed to hate in high school, but I now dread leaving behind. While I know every major life change takes adjustment before it becomes great, I know it’s only natural to have multiple fears of the unexplored life that lies ahead of me. These are 5 fears that I, and probably almost every other incoming college freshman, has currently or will have in the upcoming months.
1. Leaving the place we call home.
I know for many of us, the town we will watch fade away in our rearview mirror on an upcoming August day is the same town we spent the last 18 years of our lives in. We learned to drive on the backroads, have a specific restaurant where the waiters and waitresses know our names and orders by heart and we know exactly what each park looks like after dark. When you become so familiar with a place, the thought of leaving it behind is unsettling. It’s hard to start somewhere new, when the place you’re leaving behind is more than just a place or a town- it’s home.
2. Leaving behind our families.
I grew up in a tight-knit family. My mom is my best friend and my little sister and I are inseparable. The thought of being hours away from them when I’m stressed out or upset or excited and proud, and knowing that they won’t be there to talk me through it and give me a hug or celebrate with me and listen to my long stories about my every detail of my day creates some pre-college jitters. Whether you’re super close to your family or you barely talk to them, the thought of the people that have been a part of your life every single day for the last 18 years suddenly not being there is terrifying.
3. Losing touch with friends.
In high school, we likely saw our best friend every single day. Whether it was in class, at lunch or afterschool, or maybe even all three of those, it was easy to stay in touch. They were a part of our everyday routine and going to college separate from them means staying in touch will require extra effort. College is said to be extremely busy, which means it will be easy to get too wrapped up in the college life and lose touch with the friends that once meant the world to us. Some will say that if they meant that much, you don’t lose touch, but sometimes life gets in the way and it’s sad to think that the people that once knew even our deepest secrets eventually may not even know our current major.
4. Failure.
All of high school, we are told that college is so much harder because not only does the work get harder, but the expectations we are held to become higher and the responsibilities we are accountable for are more vast. Not to mention, we are each now responsible for the choosing the topic we will ultimately make a career out of. At 17 and 18 years old, we have spend our entire lives thus far being told how to live. We were told what classes were required to graduate in high school and we were shaped to be the people our adult authority figures wanted us to be. We had little to no opportunities to truly make our own decisions, but we are now faced with choices that will determine our entire lives. As someone who is a complete perfectionist and people pleaser, as well as someone who stresses over everything from major tests to the look I accidentally gave some random stranger in Walmart, the thought of being unsuccessful in college, the place where success is the number one goal and priority, is mortifying. The thought of pursuing a major that will give me a career I will hate after 5 years is even more mortifying. Unlike high school, the consequences of failure in college are much more impactful. In high school, if you got behind in a particular class, someone was always there to help you get caught back up, and although every decision we made had consequences, the consequences were insignificant compared to the consequence of pursuing a career you end up not being passionate about. Everyone has dreams but not everyone makes their dreams come true, and there’s not a statement more depressing nor as terrifying as that one.
5. The Unknown.
This wraps all of the fears into one- the fear of not knowing what is coming next. Our lives have been mostly static for the last 18 years, with only minor changes, like transitioning from middle school to high school. For the most part, everything has always remained the same, creating a comfort zone. College is the first major step into adulthood, and because we don’t know what to expect we are scared of it. We hear the raves and the horror stories, but we don’t have our own account of what college will actually be like, and because of that, it’s easy and also totally normal to be afraid of it.
Despite the many fears that come with the transition into university life, there’s beauty in it. There’s beauty in not knowing who you are or what you’re doing, because there’s beauty in figuring it out. There’s beauty in being afraid to leave your comfort zone, and being scared to fail and being afraid of what you are unfamiliar with. Change is scary, and making your dreams reality is scary, especially when you don’t know if the dreams you planned on, are really your dreams at all. But the beauty of the part of our lives that we are entering is that we finally have the freedom to discover our dreams, and maybe that isn’t scary, but instead comforting. There’s comfort in knowing that we don’t have to depend on anyone anymore and it’s up to us to figure out what is best. It’s up to us find out what our dreams are and pursue them, because there’s no longer any requirements. We are no longer required to take PE when we have no interest in athletics, and we aren’t required to take any more math than what is needed for our basics if we hate math. We get to decide what is a requirement for the life we want, and even if we don’t know what that is, we get the privilege of figuring it out, even if that means straying from your childhood dreams or the plans made that you thought were concrete. The thought of leaving the only life we’ve ever known for a place we have never experienced where it’s up to us find out what it takes to succeed is absolutely terrifying, and it will be until college life becomes a life we are familiar with. But there’s also beauty in this phase of our lives because there’s beauty in not knowing what we want but having the ability to figure it out. There’s beauty in the unknown, and there’s beauty in being scared of it.
