“Things will get better.” Although the sentiment is nice, often times when you hear this phrase, it doesn’t do much to comfort you. I know this because there was a time where I had convinced myself that there was no way things could possibly get better. And the saddest part is the fact that I’ve felt this way several times throughout my life. Whether it was one of the many times that I moved and had to start over at a new school or the hellish year I spent at a university that made me feel hopeless, each time all I can remember feeling about that time was “how can this possibly get better?”
Sometimes I would wake up in the mornings and wonder how I could even get the motivation to get up. There seemed to be nothing good going on and I would have rather just stay in bed all day and hide from the world. And it would’ve been so easy for me to do that.
But in the back of my mind I always had this idea “this has to get better, right?” Even if I didn’t fully believe that it would, I would kind of try to trick my mind into thinking that it would get better. Instead of doing anything that would truly help my problem, I would instead just pick events or things to look forward to and those would get me through every week. Even if it was as small as going over to my friend’s dorm for a couple hours, that is what I would use to get myself up and through the days.
And it wasn’t until I was out of these toxic environments that I finally realized the key that I had been missing for so long: Change.
The real issue I had been having with these situations was the fact that I was living each day exactly the same. I had regular routines and I wouldn’t break them. Often times, I would even go to the same place and eat the same thing for lunch. And as a result of this, the rut that I was stuck in would just continue to dig itself deeper and deeper.
In the cases of moving to a different place, the change in that case was to try and get involved more. I met more people in each of my classes and eventually the environment didn’t seem so daunting and I found myself truly enjoying my time.
As far as my collegiate experience, I took matters in my own hands, made the biggest change and put myself in a different environment that I knew I would flourish better in.
Even though there were times that I thought that there was nothing I could possibly do and that the world was ending, the most important lesson I learned was that things get better. And regardless of how cliché it is, there’s a reason so many people say it.
