Let’s take a glimpse into the daily college life, shall we? We are so good at making ourselves feel like crap. We miss a day of working out, and we’re fat. We fail a test or sleep through class and we cant stop saying, “I need to get my life together.” You forgot someone’s birthday and you label yourself as a horrible person until you make up for it in some ridiculous, unnecessary way. Why do we do that? Why do we always need other people telling us to give ourselves a break? Unless you think very highly of yourself — in which case you can stop reading here — it’s because there’s an impossibly high bar set for us. So to whoever set that bar, you suck. But for the rest of us, we go every day trying to get there. What we need to work on is being okay when we don’t make it.
Right now, I’m reading Amy Poehler’s book, Yes Please. In it she says that everyone’s life is like one big stew (sounds a little unpleasant), but she has a point. Each person's stew should be delicious and filling, but her main idea was that we shouldn’t ask about the ingredients. I took that to mean: stop analyzing every little thing in your life, because when you look back in a week or a month or even a year, it actually won’t matter at all.
It’s like when you have that one really bad Saturday night, you dwell on it for about two months until you’re friends hate you for continuously talking about it. They tell us it’s okay and our mistake is in the past, no matter how big or small it is because we need that reassurance. We keep waiting to feel resolved. No way could we convince ourselves of this. We try to turn back the clock and cover our footsteps or our faults somehow. Here’s a tip: It doesn’t work. Move on.
There are a lot of college situations where we must be mature. If we have an exam, we know to study days in advance because we all know we aren’t in high school anymore. We have to buy blazers and unfortunate pant suits because we have a career fair or interview next week. We have to pull ourselves together for our 8:30 classes on Friday morning despite the previous night’s festivities.
These are situations where we have to be adults, even though the night before we were definitely acting like kids. Finding a balance is hard, but we've got no choice. These are lessons we can’t escape from learning and we choose whether we learn the hard way or the easy way. So we need to stop feeling guilty for those times we mess up, because without them, the lesson would be meaningless. We sometimes feel there’s an older, more mature version of us watching over our 19-22 year old rough drafts, and we have to keep living to catch up with the older version. But we can’t rush the process because we’ll miss the important stuff. We can’t take the short cuts or the easy way out. Our older selves will thank us someday.
I hope this article doesn't make me sound like a life coach or your grandma’s corny advice, because we don’t need any more of that. Now that I’m re-reading it, it reminds me of a Meredith Grey narration at the beginning and/or end of a Grey’s Anatomy episode, which I’m completely okay with. I guess the refined purpose here is to realize that we are better than we think. We put up our own bars and get too comfortable in our own prisons. Any place you don't leave is a prison, so change your outlook if you're stuck. Just don’t hate yourself for each little bump in the road. We all get over those bumps eventually.
