It seems as though I have arrived at the pinnacle of transition in my young life. Here I am, Nikolah Kershisnik, a freshman at Eckerd College in Saint Petersburg, Florida, and so very far from home. How do I feel? Ha. What don't I feel? I am entirely consumed by this mad collage of emotions; ranging from anxiety, insecurity, anticipation, and ennui.

As freshmen in college, we have ultimately uprooted our world that we had developed and sustained for the past 18 years, packed it all into a few small boxes and uttered a soft prayer as we waved goodbye to our parents, and goodbye to childhood. See the funny thing is, this was supposed to be the easy part for me. I have defined myself as independent since age five and I wouldn't allow my mother to walk me into my first day of preschool because it was time for me to be a "big girl"... boy, am I eating my words now.

Always feeling some sort of displacement throughout elementary, middle and high school, it became a mantra of mine that college would be different. College would be my safe haven, where I could finally do as I pleased and be exactly who I had thought myself to be: the person I was never able to reveal under the expectations, assumptions and confinements held against me. As it turns out, to be entirely free of attachments, to be here as a person of my own, for my own gain and that of no others, is far more of a terrifying liberation that I could have ever illustrated in my most profound moments. I have no clue who I want to be, for there is not a soul, nor whispering wind instructing me on who I should be.

My mother told me this past year, after enduring an all too painful breakup that "there is pain in change and there in pain in staying the same. Choose the one that moves you forward." It is not that I am homesick, or miss my family, (although of course I do), but this sensation of mourning at the absence of the awareness I once owned of my own presence, and its impact on the world around me. Here I am, a stranger, foreign to this Sushine State, to the college lifestyle, to my peers and foreign unto myself. The critical component that I seem to be missing is finding the empowerment in this off-leash utopia. I must learn to cherish myself, and live to feed my soul, above all else in order to survive; to be happy. How funny it is that not just three months prior to this vey moment, I could give you a ten page paper full of bullet points and extensive paragraphs containing profound descriptions of the ideal version I held myself standard to. And now? I'd be lucky to offer even a cohesive sentence.

I guess that is where the essential beauty lies in all this organized chaos: in the transition from child to adulthood, we not only get to introduce ourselves to a swarm of entirely new people, however we may choose to do so, but we also gain a reintroduction to that figure who will never escape the confines of our own minds and reflection.