My freshman year of college sucked. Plain and simple. I’m shy and struggled to make friends. I also had pretty bad social anxiety that kept me from going anywhere without the security of another person. So everyday of my freshman year of college I stayed in my shoebox of a dorm room with not even a roommate to keep me company. I wasn’t thrilled about my classes, for some reason didn’t trust my GPS to get me from point A to B, and didn’t appreciate the lack of sincerity when it came to professor-student relationships. I impulsively committed to the school after one tour simply because it had the best program for what I wanted to study, not necessarily because it was a good fit for me personally.
I was miserable. No friends. Ok grades (which wasn’t like me) and nothing in which to look forward. I cried and cried over what I thought was the “worst decision” I could have ever made. I honestly felt so stupid for choosing a so-called “party school” when I’m as introverted as they get. On multiple occasions I threw my hands up in the air, pushed my chair back from my desk, wiped the tears off my cheeks, called members of my support system and with their input decided I was going to transfer schools.
But each time I never went through with it. And here’s why.
Coming to a new school with new people and new surroundings was scary to say the least. And in my case borderline traumatizing. I didn’t want to go through that again.
But there’s also the idea of “Wherever you go, there you are” from the book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” by Richard Carlson. The idea that quite literally… wherever you go, there you are. In the book it reads, “We tend to believe that if we were somewhere else—on vacation, with another partner, in a different career, a different home, a different circumstance—somehow, we would be happier and more content. We wouldn’t!”
The main idea is that your mindset and attitudes will follow you, wherever you go. As a student at Ohio University, I beat myself for passing up an opportunity to go to a school that gave me more scholarship money, but if I chose to go to that and it didn’t work out, I would have beat myself up about passing up an opportunity to go to Ohio University that has the best journalism program in the state. Nothing would ever be enough for me so long as I held on to the idea that the grass was always greener on the other side.
Maybe Ohio University wasn’t the best school for me, but ultimately, I have the final say on that. I could choose to dwell on what could be the “worst decision” I’ve ever made. Or I could make the most of it. Because wherever you go, there you are.
