I remember the first day of college being eerily calm. Getting on the train alone for the first time and riding with other people that, unlike the school buses of years prior, I would probably never see or recognize, again.

I remember experiencing a degree of depersonalization at the realization that I was now part of the horde of rat-racing working fold came upon me and hung in the train like a dull phantom. I remember I was taking Spanish 1001 (the class that provoked my interest in the language, actually), and, partly due to the small class size, seeing it as no different from a high school class. Even Anderson Hall’s crowds were not intimidating as years of attending public school with thousands of students moving simultaneously had prepared me for this. When I attended my other classes, which were significantly larger in class size (my largest was nearly 150 students I believe), I still felt no different.

It was the throngs of people, I think, that caused some degree of a welcoming alienation, that distracted me from the changes. And now that I approach the middle of my second semester, I am attentive to the massive acceleration which has taken my life.

High school graduation, walking out of the Liacouras Center, hugging my friend goodbye, and going back home in a suit (something I was wearing for the second time in recent memory), my reinvigorated love of exercise; all these things happened within the span of a couple months. That summer was long and easily the best of my life, and my first semester cut the brakes, speeding past my first college finals and winter break, losing all the few people that had entered my life in such a large and varied environment.

I also find myself wondering what older students feel. The ones who have spent at least part of their college experience here, in fact, the ones who transfer especially. For any who might read this and fit into one of those categories, what are your feelings on the matter? Have you taken time to reflect? And what do you feel when you do?

I’m young. 19 years old, to be exact. And already I find myself reflecting on what has happened thus far in my limited life, in awe at the amount of milestones, mishaps, misanthropy and happiness, incidents and episodes, eras and epochs that have led me to this place at this time.

I have heart, but I lack confidence, and so the future gives me an atrocious mix of fear and boldness, perhaps in response to the fear, that ultimately culminates in stoicism, that which eventually and regretfully returns to begin the cycle anew nearly every day.

I am stressed without right to be. I am worried with some right, and I am afraid with full rights given to me. I’ve been told time and time again that life will lead me somewhere if I would just follow it, but that degree of powerlessness is not something I can readily accepts, so I take the reins of an uncontrollable horse and hope for the best as it flings me about, taking advantage of any slack I give it.

I don’t know what I want to be. And I hear no one ever does. But doubt swallows me.