I’ve been in college about a year and a half now and I am slowly starting to lose my grasp on reality with each passing day. When asked if I feel stressed while I’m at college I would answer “yes, because I’m at college.” College students are starting to believe that being stressed is always a bad thing and that stress shouldn’t be present in school. Higher education isn’t easy and is supposed to be stressful. You are not anxious and you don’t have depression, that is just the normal feeling of worrying about passing an exam and feeling sad sometimes because you’re human.

Reading last week’s edition of the Castleton Spartan I noticed something rather peculiar under the Word On the Street section. Students were asked questions along the lines of how depression and anxiety effects their lives. Some of the answers were that college made them feel depressed and stressed and one student claimed that they needed therapy. I understand that stress affects everyone differently and that some people have more mental effects than physical, but my article isn’t about how it effects students. My article is about how mentally weak and non-resilient students are.

I’m still wondering why people are not accepting that life is hard. Walk around a liberal arts college campus and you will see students wearing safety pins on their shirts to show others that they are a safe space for hurtful words. You are never going to eliminate hurtful, racist, and offensive language so long as this country still stands. The 1^st amendment to the United States Constitution protects every American’s right to freedom of expression, and yes, even if it hurts your feelings. I do in no way support or condone violent or illegal acts such as threatening someone due to their religion or defacing personal or public property with vandalism.

I’ve been in the army for three years now, I’ve had people yell in my face, tell me I’m worthless, and say offensive things to me, but I’ve never needed a safe space because of it. You don’t need to be a soldier to not let someone’s words affect you. Normal life outside of college is not one giant safe space. There will always be people to say mean things and the best way to combat that is not a safety pin, but simply ignoring them, like an adult to a whining child.