As graduation rapidly approaches, it's become all too common to see the ever-dwindling number of remaining days of college plastered all over every form of social media. The warmer weather causes an influx of outdoor activities, which is all well and good, but why must they be justified with the too-few remaining days of senior year? We can still post snapchat stories and clever Instagram's without tacking on that scarily low number at the end. The past nine months have been nothing short of anxiety-ridden, as the reality of graduation sets in deeper with each passing day. However, the constant reminder is just unnecessary people!
Instead of harping on the days we don't have, I think we should be focusing our efforts on the days we do have. We still have a certain number (I refuse to write how many, because it's just too depressing) of days where it's socially acceptable to take mid-day naps, drink heavily on weeknights for no good reason, and embrace having the freedom, but not the responsibility of being a real adult. Everybody wants to make a point of constantly reminding each other how many days we're lucky enough to still have, but I think we should be living the days we have left, regardless of how few may be left.
I've personally been taking "carpe diem" to new heights in recent weeks, because why the hell not? What's the alternative? I get sucked into a rabbit hole of "30-something days till graduation," and how god awful that sounds, and how vividly I can remember freshman move-in day, and how I could've sworn I was abroad four days ago. Before I know it, it's 3 AM and I'm wildly tossing and turning, hopelessly trying to shake the anxiety from my brain. Because as close as we get, and as much as I try to push it from my brain, we are scarily close to graduation, and my brain just can't seem to fathom that. At all.
I have a hard time coping with the fact that we were freshman three entire years ago. I was a bundle of nerves and anxious energy, and didn't know what to expect. Everything was fresh and new and exciting, and I didn't think life could get better than those early college days. Except it did. It just kept getting better. We learned and we laughed and we lived. We traveled the world, we made a family out of strangers, and we made homes out of tiny dorm rooms. We drank too much, cried too much, and probably didn't do enough homework. We went sledding late at night, sitting in the snow, freezing our asses off, and still talk about it today. We can't listen to certain songs without getting grossly nostalgic, and we can't pass our sophomore house without getting embarrassingly teary.
And four years was just not enough time.
So I'm going to take the next however many days and use them to celebrate the past four years. We may not have much left, but we've got something.
