The world always looks a little worse at 7:00 a.m. when the sun hasn’t risen and the bags under your eyes are glaring back at you in the mirror, and you haven’t had your cup of coffee yet. Some mornings it gets harder and harder to get out of bed. To find a good reason to pull yourself from the comfort of your covers and force yourself to have a day, not even a good one, because the majority of the time you don’t even have a good one planned. Because today is a day no different from the others. Whether it be you’re running to work, or school, or both the majority of us have some sort of responsibility waiting for us, or else we wouldn’t be up this early in the first place. You’ll start to wonder if money is actually as valuable as we make it, if your life would be just as good if you packed a few pairs of clean underwear and white t-shirts and headed out to the forest to see if you could be just as happy as a noble savage than you are as a broke college student; I haven’t tried it myself, but I’m pretty confident this isn’t the life for you.

Last week was rainy, students on campus were either dragging their feet or running with $200 dollar texts books we all cringed when we bought, covering the hair that took them an extra 15 minutes this morning. Time is money, but sometimes I couldn’t care less about either, these moments were about not getting wet because that would just “ruin your day”. Days like these or months like these or even years like these seem impossible, you tell yourself that you just have one day to make it through, or one week or one year and it’ll be better in the end but sometimes it seems as though you could never make it and you are failing to remember the last time you even slept? But, there are a thousand ways to get past this. Pour your cup of coffee and take everything one step at a time, each essay is only one paragraph, then two, then three until it’s the eight pages that’s due tomorrow that you barely started last night. Each day at your job is only one hour until its your whole 7-hour shift. Each class is only one class until you have gotten through your whole day. For a while it felt like I would never make it out of high school, that I would be stuck being judged by people who only ever wore white Converse and football shirts and spoke of who would be the next prom queen or if you heard about what happened with one of the many Sara’s, but I made it out, and the world keeps spinning, while that is sometimes the tragedy.

So if you have no reason to get up in the morning, if that bio quiz or math exam is not enough to pull you from the dream you would do anything to spend all day relishing in, give yourself a pep talk, buy yourself a candy bar, treat yourself how a parent would treat their child who had just experienced a big change because you are fragile too. Make yourself happy before all else. I wasted a lot of time ensuring that everyone around me was good when really I was the one drowning. Be your own parent or call your parents for a little bit of inspiration, hold your own hand and buy your own ice cream cone (I guarantee the last one will help). The sun will rise eventually and with midterms approaching and finals only months away, I will share the only way I got through every school year, the key to success in an academic setting is to always remember: there will forever be someone dumber than you, just be careful if you go to Harvard.