The hardest part of starting my freshman year at college was moving away from all my friends. I was so used to seeing these people five days a week for eight hours at a time and going separate ways just felt wrong. Friends I’ve had since kindergarten, who were ten minutes away from my house, were suddenly hours and hours away.
Your friends are scared to lose you, too. I know.
We all feel like we're going through the motions.
All of my friends take the maximum amount of classes they're allowed. Every class is a heavy workload. We have speeches to give, presentations to organize, PowerPoint slides to design, art projects to finish, film shorts to edit, statistics to graph and rehearsals to attend, just like you. We're all busy. Welcome to college. Welcome to adulthood.
College is not all windows-down, music-blasting 1 a.m. runs to McDonalds. It's not all cheap vodka and hookups and togas and fairy lights and letters and t-shirts. College is those things, but college is biting your nails, college is worrying if your friend is downing a bit too much of that cheap vodka every night, college is stresses and uncertainty, anxieties, and responsibilities.
Friends who cheated on their partners. Partners who cheated on my friends. Friends dealing with breakups. Friends who need to break up because their relationships are toxic. Friends who need to break up because their relationships are abusive. Friends with eating disorders. Friends in mental hospitals. Friends in medical hospitals. Friends who got kicked out of their homes, or didn't want to go back to their homes. Friends dealing with death. Friends dealing with divorce. Friends scared they'd start looking at their razors as more than a device for shaving again. Friends wondering how they're going to pay for the next semester of college. And yet, here I am, saying "friends" as if to distance myself from the matter that all of these things are happening in my own life, too.
The couch you see normally littered with Taco Bell sauce packets and pizza boxes on Snapchat? Don't be confused. My shirt has been soaked with tears holding shaking bodies at 3 a.m. on that couch. My hands have gripped hands that once attempted suicide and speak fearfully of it again on that couch. That couch became an inn for friends who were scared of what they might do if they were alone. That couch became a nursing bed of cough drop wrappers, blankets, puke buckets, and glasses of water, which any roommate, at any time, would be willing to replenish. The highlight reel you saw was a couch that served a social conference convention by day and a therapy room by night.
Friends who had not felt happy, much less, a semblance of consistent contentedness in months. As a friend and Human Being, my utmost desire is for people to be happy. Anything less is selfish.
I've always been a bit of a contortionist when it comes to my schedule, bending over backwards and spreading myself as thin as I can, until my bones pop and I reach just won't stretch any further. And the insomnia comes crashing down, striking my temples with a shimmering, dizzying daze. The pulse in my heart gets excited over nothing and I'm trying not to retch up stomach acid from the breakfast I didn't eat (no time) before I can make it to my bed and collapse, hopefully for an hour (possibly two) for a nap, bringing my grand total of hours asleep to a whopping 5.
This article is in response to "I Feel Like I'm The Only One Not Enjoying College" and anyone else, commuter or otherwise, who may be feeling this way. It is not meant to bash or libel, but simply, to offer a flipped perspective.
