Ah, finally. After the constant stress of justifying myself and my accomplishments within required word counts and prompts, I’m finally here! College: Where my hard-working, overachieving high school self is finally repaid.
The college decision process brought out the extreme couponer in me. Except, I wasn’t necessarily waiting in line at the grocery store on Super Bowl Sunday, fighting the cashier to give me my second bag of Skinny Pop for free. Instead, I battled it out for compensation for my achievements (member of the 2009 rec softball championship team, being my dog's favorite, and everything in between, of course).
How many could I trade in to get maximum benefits for my future?
(me after I fit all of my life accomplishments into a 250-word essay)
While the process was grueling, I was generally satisfied with the outcome: I definitely got some good deals, and I could finally reap the benefits (and enjoy some SkinnyPop, of course). And then the day finally came for me to pack up the car, and as I doubted my ability to consolidate 6 months worth of clothing into a few bins, I also started to wonder if I could really do it. How would I build an entirely new me with only a couple bins of home to work with?
With that being said, I quickly unpacked my boxes, taped some memories on the wall, and with that, I was on my own. And even after the tearful goodbye, it didn’t seem so bad.
While each year of my life was designated as “The Year of Organization and Having My Life Together,” I actually followed through with this expectation my first week of college, making a Google calendar to schedule out my days, leaving little room for error. With color-coded tabs and reminders piling on top of each other, the days started to pass with the checking off of to-dos, to which I was very pleased.
But the first few months of college quickly became a spiral that continued to tighten as I got ahold of it: no matter how far down I spun, there was still a destination that I had yet to reach. With each person I met, a curve was added to the spiral; each curve of the spiral reminding me of another goal that I had yet to accomplish.
Suddenly, I needed to be a math wiz student athlete who also plays guitar and provided water for all of Africa the summer after I toured the United States for my Nobel Prize-winning book; these weren’t exactly easy to color code in Google Calendar.
In college, everyone you meet is kind of, well, awesome, and it’s easy to forget that you are, well, maybe awesome too. Being in an environment where everyone has done something spectacular can be a great reminder of how small you are, and while it is great to be inspired by the new faces around you, it is equally as important to keep tabs on your place on the spiral.
The thing is, with each new destination in life comes a fresh start, which sometimes means starting a new coupon book from scratch. It may seem like all of our past accomplishments that had seemed so miraculous at one point have been wiped away, but that's not exactly the truth. Just like coupons from 2010 won't get you a free bag of chips, we can't bank on all of our achievements from the past to continue to lift us up.
It’s hard to see new opportunities when your perspective is blurred by the past accomplishments of everyone around you. Our present goals cannot be aligned with someone else's past. It’s like constantly updating your destination on Google Maps, you’re never going to get to where you want to be, especially without stopping at rest stops along the way to refuel.
If we constantly speed along at 80 miles per hour, it’s easy to think that all of the other cars are doing that too, when in reality, the child prodigy in your physics class is pulled over on the side of the road to regain some energy and snack on some gummies before the next exam. It's okay to just be average sometimes: it forces us to push forward in the pursuit of something great, even if we don't know what it is yet.
With a huge transition comes a lot of doubt. But before we let ourselves spin, we have to realize that there is no room for comparison to others on our spiral; all it does is blur our vision and set us further from our own destination. It’d be like trying to cash in a Trader Joe’s coupon at Whole Foods: the effort is there, but really I just wasted gas money driving the extra mile to Whole Foods, and now I have to pay 70 dollars for peanut butter.
It’s pretty simple, use what you have and don’t be afraid of a little spinning, it only means that we are getting closer to our destination, and maybe even a good deal at Whole Foods (just kidding, let’s not get too unrealistic here)!
(This article is not sponsored by Google programs).