To an unsuspecting high school girl, the notion of college is akin to a perfectly curated Pinterest board. For me, it was an idealized lifestyle painted in purple and gold, studded with lofty goals and my blue bike adorned with a wicker basket for carrying my books to class.
Going into college, I knew people often considered these four years to be an incessant beer-soaked toga stomp, but I still had painted an image of myself walking under stately oaks, mind opened and free and swimming with liberal ideals that would make my parents croak. As students, we would blossom with ideas and deep perception… we would be colored by a newfound understanding for the world! I had even romanticized the notion of doing my own laundry. The scene looked disheveled in the most alluring way possible. I would sit on a bench and glamorously highlight page after page of my overpriced textbook while waiting on my effortlessly casual lecture blouses to finish drying. I blame it on Pinterest.
Anyone who’s lived a week in a college dorm knows this picture is far from the truth. These past six months of living on my own, I have realized showers are overrated and Chick-fil-A is not. Most of your wardrobe consists of hand-me-down sorority shirts from date functions past, worn to the point where you feel sympathy towards your classmates for making them stare at the back of your great-grand-big’s 2010 spring GRUB shirt… again.
Movies, books, and popular culture have portrayed college as a quadrennial period dedicated to self-understanding, ceaseless partying, and intense learning. These cinematic experiences are glossed over and exist in a world where sleep is not fundamental for survival and looking bright eyed after a late night out is completely feasible. What i’ve come to learn about the reality of college is this: coffee is it’s own food group, and contrary to popular belief, sleep is actually vital to survival.
The joys, heartbreaks, friendships, and failures we experience in these four years our ours and only ours. They are our personal stories and our personal memories and our personal adventures. No, they are not as glamorous as the movies, as picturesque as the books, or maybe not even what we had thought it would be. But that is because we are experiencing life in the most honest and pure form. There is nothing more beautiful, exciting, and exhilarating than living out our own stories, taking our own chances, and making our own adventures.
