An open letter to myself:
As my freshman year comes to an end, I'll soon be overwhelmed with exams for the last time before three long months of vacation. During this time, I find myself reflecting over my past scholastic year. I grew up a lot, I got my first job, and I had to stick to my responsibilities. That meant I had to leave on my own and be aware of the fact that there was nobody waiting for me to come home at night, that I had no curfew and nobody forcing me to not go out on a certain night. I had to start making my own choices and I had to forget about the old excuse, "My mom won't let me come to the party tonight." It was so easy to use every time I didn't want to go out. Together, with this new freedom of choosing when to study and when to have fun, I experienced "FOMO" for the very first time as well. This is something I took a while to understand.
When my parents and I attended all the orientation meetings in September, and the psychologists kept mentioning this "FOMO," I had to google it. I found out that "FOMO" is also known as "Fear Of Missing Out," and I just laughed about it, thinking it was just an exaggeration and would not affect me. Anyway, only a few weeks later into my college experience, I had to reconsider it. I was actually continuously stressing out, not only about my classes and my grades, but also even more about the "fun" part of college. How many times I've been told "skip the class and chill here with me!" or "you have to live college life with me tonight," and I had to stick with my responsibilities when the situations needed me to (spending half of the time actually studying and the other half watching the Snapchats of my friends having fun and pondering if my choice was actually right.) Other times, I followed my friends even when I really shouldn't have, and then regretted it, coming home at three a.m. on a Saturday night and starting to study while tipsy because I wouldn't be able to finish studying the next day. I thought I was the only one, but then, when I started talking about it with people, I realized that everyone else feels the same. Everyone has the same fears and experiences, the tradeoff between acing all your classes and being socially active and popular. This is actually what made me grow up even more. I started being more confident in my choices and stuck with them. I have three more years to understand how to perfectly balance my duties while enjoying college to the maximum. You can do it!
