School at the beginning of the year is super fun. You have syllabus week where there is no work (or minimal work) and regardless, you just pretend like school hasn’t even started. It’s the best of times, you can go out, you can watch Netflix endlessly, do only twenty minutes of homework a night, all the good things in life. It’s a nice welcome back from the summer, and you’re reminded how much you love college because college is so, so fun. You post pictures from a party on a Wednesday and you just feel so #college and can’t imagine life getting better than it is right now, and you also are in complete denial that there’s a thing called schoolwork that’s hiding around the corner waiting to attack you the minute you blindly turn said corner.

The second week of school hits and you decide that you’re going to be serious and study, and you do more work than you did the first week, but you don’t do work. You can still go out twice, three times in a week and are fine with it, and people haven’t assumed you’ve died yet because you are responding to texts and haven’t become an antisocial gremlin yet. You’re aware of the fact that exams are coming in the near future but, have no fear, you are able to manage your time and study adequately for both. You’re killing it this year.

Week three comes and time management becomes a foreign concept. You have no idea how to study for two tests in one week, and properly interacting with humans is the last thing you’re thinking of. Endocrinology and Genetics blend together and you’re utterly confused which exam is which and when and where. Oh, not to mention, you inevitably have a little cold. Now, your socialization consists of quick hellos in the library, if that, and maybe a few words exchanged with your roommates when you walk in the apartment at 11 p.m. with a turtle shell like backpack (because you do carry the entirety of your life on your back) but you know at the end of the week, you can have some fun, and you just need to get through your exams.

Two exams down, you’re feeling on top of the world, having good weekend instead of stressing about how much work you have to do and you all of a sudden notice a familiar burning in your chest, and you’re coughing a lot, and also your throat is so swollen you can’t speak or breathe or take any medicine. That pesky little cold hasn’t gone away, and has even gotten worse. And you also feel like a truck hit you so there’s that, but you have an Orgo exam in a week and you promised yourself you’d get ahead of your work so you could have the bulk of studying done before the weekend. You, instead, spend the early part of the week in bed with Bronchitis because the universe hates you, and you get no studying done. Then, when everyone else is socializing at the end of the week, you feel to guilty for what little work you’ve done to join them, so you isolate in the library for the entirety of the weekend. You’re losing it now, and think about the end of the week of your Orgo exam when you’ll be done, but alas you have an exam early the next week AND LATER IN THE SAME WEEK and you just officially give up on trying to be a real human and remember why every single semester before has been spent hibernating in the library.

So socialization isn’t a thing for you anymore, that’s fine, you can still wave at people as you walk through the library, and talking to your mom on the phone counts, right? Who needs humans anyway, when you have coffee and bond model kits, am I right? College is still fun…

What can I say? College is weird, how else do you explain going from being a social animal the first week to a hermit the next?