“College is the best four years of your life.”
I’ve probably heard this phrase 487 times in my life. From family, from friends, from complete strangers. It’s basically a universal sentiment.
When you tell an adult you’re about to embark on your four college years, they’re likely to saddle you with their old college stories. Their eyes start to shine as they tell you tales of crazy nights and far-off friends. And when they’ve finished telling you about the time they stole trays from the cafeteria to go sledding, they let out a wistful sigh and tell you how jealous they are.
In the period before you go to college, strangers open up to you in a way they never have before. I once sat next to a middle-aged man on a plane who decided to take it upon himself to give me life advice when he’d only just met me. “Don’t give those boys the time of day. College is about studying.”
And so, after years of advice and rather uncomfortable storytelling, I found myself standing alone in my first college dorm room. I was free, as they say. Free from high school, free from my parents, free to do anything I pleased. And I felt...free?
Free was an interesting word to describe what I was feeling as I lay in bed on that first night. I was excited about all the newness around me, certainly. But there seemed to be something tugging me down. It was those words of advice, those sweeping statements about college rattling around in my head.
They seemed to keep tugging me down as I stumbled my way through my first semester of college. I began to compare what I was experiencing to every anecdote I’d heard from my mom, my sister, and the rest of my extended family. Slowly I began to feel utterly unlike myself.
Do I belong here? I asked myself constantly. Am I having the time of my life right now? Are these the friends I’ll always remember from college?
It took me a whole semester to realize what was happening. I was so in my head that I couldn’t even begin to have the time of my life. I internalized both my expectations, and everybody else’s expectations of college, and thought I was doing something wrong.
The truth is, nobody can have the time of their life for four straight years. Even, and sometimes especially, amongst the best of times, there are bad days, and bad feelings. Being happy all the time is simply unrealistic.
College is not some otherworldly place where all your problems go away. You have got to have the bad days so you can love the good days even more. Once you are able to accept that, you will be able to have some pretty wonderful times of your life.
