This is college. It’s supposed to be the best years of our lives. We are supposed to be making connections, becoming culturally enriched, and meeting our future wedding parties. This is what high school was supposed to be building up to. Living in different cities and learning what you want to learn. It’s not a huge disappointment, but maybe I got my hopes up a little too high.

In reality, it’s sleepless nights listening to the stranger in your room breathe too heavily. It’s getting halfway to class and it starts to downpour. It’s forgetting the same assignment that’s due every Tuesday night. It’s standing in a classroom trying to find the seat that’s not sitting directly next to anyone, so you can be alone. It’s forcing yourself to go to events put on by the school and then just ending up leaving early. It’s not understanding simple things like how to transfer credits or what drop/add is. It’s being lost everywhere you go. It’s not being able to tell the actual excuse to your professor: I’m not lazy I just still am figuring out how college works and I didn’t submit it right. It’s reality and college is hard.

It’s instinct too. When your family asks how you are you’re never going to respond, “Great but I’m drowning in school work and no one texts me back in the group chats and I don’t know anyone in my classes and I’m still not taking classes for my major and I accidentally tripped when the school shuttle honked really loud and everyone saw me.” You just respond, “Great. It’s going good so far.” You don’t want your relatives to worry about you, or think you are insane, but we should be able to tell people we care about how we are feeling. If you think about it, they stuck with us for this long, what’s going to stop them now? You don’t have to unload your problems onto your closest friend, but we shouldn’t be bottling this up to deal with ourselves when we don’t even know how to fix it.

This isn’t an article written so people will start posting Snapchats of themselves crying alone in the library and post about how terrible their grades are, but as college students, we need to be more realistic. It’s not as great as we thought it would be, and if it is for you then that’s great, but it’s definitely not like that all the time. We present ourselves as these people who never stop having fun and every moment in our lives is worth capturing. We don’t show how college is actually affecting us. We need to be more candid about our lows.

To my family reading this, I’m fine. This is not a desperate attempt to ask for help. College is great. I’m learning a lot. I’m making a lot of friends. Don’t worry about me, seriously. I’m fine.