I'm getting a little better at discussing my college experience. It seems inappropriate to unload the whole sob story of my disastrous first year on a polite inquirer, but it also seems dishonest to answer "So how have you liked college?" with anything more upbeat than a grimace.

Usually, I deflect. "It's not quite what I expected" or "College took some adjustment but I really like New York City!", or "I'm happy to be home now". Despite fretting over an honest but vague answer for a while now, I have yet to find the perfect balance.

But on more than one occasion, my conversation partner's reply steers the mood downhill, anyway. Adults chuckle and say: "Well, enjoy college while you can. It only gets worse from there!" oblivious to the true depths of my college woes.

I know it's a running joke that adulthood is a terrible experience we would all opt out of if we could. No one likes the responsibility of paying bills, taxes, or mortgages, and it's even worse for everyone that has to endure the daily grind of a soul-crushing job in order to finance all those responsibilities. And then, there's the existential dread that goes hand-in-hand with devoting your life to barely staying afloat.

I know that anyone saying life inevitably gets worse after college is just making a joke—perhaps one laced with a little bitterness if hindsight has convinced them that they would be so much better at college if they did it over again. Better than, say, all those silly teens who waste their time partying or skipping class or, in my case, taking afternoon naps to hide from overwhelming stress.

But that's just the thing. Those of us actually, currently doing college aren't middle-aged, prepared for all of life's ups and downs with years of prior experience or even fully-developed brains. That doesn't mean we're incapable of handling hardship and neither does it mean we'll never face worse later in life. But it does mean that for us, college can be the hardest thing we've ever done.

And college is hard. It means being separated from our family and friends, having to deal with difficult classes, hours upon hours of homework and studying, and navigating issues of identity and independence for the first time without the safety net of familiar surroundings to catch us.

Meeting new people is hard. Deciding whether to change majors is hard. Not seeing your parents and pets for months at a time is hard. Sometimes, all of that piles up and getting out of bed at all becomes hard.

College is hard.

And I wish adults would stop invalidating that for the sake of getting in a dig about how kids these days don't know how good we have it.

Frankly, even if college weren't hard at all, it's not really appropriate to respond to someone's account of their life experiences—positive or negative—with a statement about how much worse yours are. That kind of one-upmanship is unnecessary and unhelpful.

If someone tells you they're hurting and your response consists in explaining how you've been hurt worse and they probably will be too, you're being a jerk. If someone tells you they're doing okay, and your response is to interject that their status will deteriorate soon enough, you're being a jerk. If someone tells you they're happy, and your response is to tell them their happiness is temporary and probably misguided, you're being a jerk.

Granted, the conversation about college must be just as awkward for those adult acquaintances as it is for me. They feel obligated to ask how college is going and then, faced with my attempts to keep the conversation bland and cheerful, don't know how to reply except for making jokes.

It's not malicious. I don't resent them for it. I understand why it happens.

But I'm already having trouble being optimistic about my present and, by extension, my future. The thought has certainly occurred to me: if adulthood with training wheels is so miserable, what happens when the training wheels come off?

I don't need any external reinforcement for that mindset.

So please, feel free to ask me about college. But refrain from speculating about what the next phase of my life will look like unless you're prepared to sanitize your speculations as much as I sanitized my comments about how college is going.

Sometimes bland and cheerful is best.