If you ask any freshman in college about what they learned freshman year, it’ll be an endless list. You learn how to study through extreme exhaustion. You learn who your real friends in high school were. You learn about yourself and you learn about loneliness, true frustration, and confusion.
However, out of this endless list of things I learned this year, I learned that time is everything.
When I applied for colleges last fall, I made sure not to apply anywhere in Illinois. My goal was to get out of the state, and out of the Midwest. Firstly, I was done with the snow. Besides that, I felt like there was so much of the world I hadn’t seen and it was time to explore. I had no concerns about homesickness and no concerns about leaving family, friends, or my hometown. Therefore, I ended up choosing the farthest school that I was accepted into.
Looking back, that was such a naïve and simple perspective. Through this year, my perspective changed quite a bit. It matured immensely in ways I didn’t expect. During second semester, after winter break, things hit a rough patch emotionally.
Word from home spread about a classmate who was hit by a drunk driver. As I wrote about in my first article, our entire town and beyond held our breaths as we prayed desperately for him to make it through and then one January morning, like so many others from home, I checked my phone and saw that he was gone. It hit so many people so hard.
After a couple weeks, I wrote that first article as a way to let go of some of those thoughts and emotions that I had no other way to express. It took a while to be able to understand what happened and what it meant.
I thought a lot about death and everyone at home for a long time after that. I didn’t have much time though because a few weeks later in February, I got some extremely unexpected news that a family member had suddenly passed away. Within a few days of the news, I flew home for the funeral and flew back within the same weekend so I wouldn’t miss more classes.
I don’t think I recognized it in the moment, but it was an emotionally stagnant time for me. I was going day by day in a kind of blur. I was doing what I could to get through each day, but I wasn’t enjoying myself. It took a while to get through this lull and after a few weeks, I realized that I needed to get back to being excited and energetic about every day and I started to turn things around.
This is what I learned. I learned that it is really damn hard to leave for months at a time. Why? Because you never know what will change while you’re gone.
That’s the fear. Every time it was time to pack up and go back to school after a break, such as Winter Break, it was harder than I ever thought. Every time I left, I left knowing it would be months before I was back. I left not knowing what would change while I was gone and it’s terrifying to think about that.
As a high school student a year ago, leaving was not even in my thoughts. I looked forward to being somewhere new. In a way, I was incredibly naïve. However, I’ve learned that things like this matter. Leaving matters. It doesn’t get easier and it actually gets harder. It’s taught me to appreciate time in a way I never did before.
I’ve learned why my mom was so emotional when it was time to go off to college. I know, now, that there are downsides to travel. It’s not all fun and games. I’ve learned that you have to make it worth it. Yes, it’s hard to go back and forth.
But if you make it worth it, you’ll be even happier every time you return home. I’ve learned to appreciate all the small things at home and to enjoy being with friends and family for the short periods of time during breaks. I’ll never be good at expressing what it means, but I’ve learned to simply enjoy those moments and never take them for granted because time changes things. Time changes everything.
Hopefully, I’ve learned enough this year that I will fully appreciate every moment I have at home this summer because now I understand that time is something you can never take for granted.
