I’ve already had my “I’m way too stressed, I can’t do this” crying session of the Spring semester and it happened before the semester even started. Winter break is great and it gives you a chance to visit all your old friends back home, hang out with mom for a couple days, and sleep in your childhood bedroom for a couple weeks. But it also gives you a lot of free time to decompress, think, and freak out!

It’s really easy during the process to forget why you are doing something and college is one of those things. It can be the most stressful, exciting, terrifying, expensive, wonderful time of your life, but it’s easy for that all to get lost in translation.

Sometimes it’s hard and you miss your family and you just want to go home. Or you take out your third student loan and you are wondering how you are ever going to make a career for yourself when you are swimming in debt. But even with all the tears I’ve shed, walls I’ve punched, and times I’ve thought about quitting, I’m still here because finally I realized I don’t have to have my whole life figured out just yet.

College like many things in life, is just a stepping stone. It’s a piece of the cobblestone path I’m traveling on along my journey. That’s what life is; a journey. There is no grand destination where you achieve everything you ever wanted and you sit there and stew in it for the rest of forever. No, it’s a process. You’ll always be trying to conquer some new thing. That’s the thrill of it, there is always something around the corner, and even when it feels stagnant, like you are trudging through a never-ending mud pit, you are still progressing.

So, the next breakdown moment when you introvert and think” I’m supposed to have this all figured out” remember that you don’t have to. That no one really knows what they are doing while they are in it. And right now, you are in it. And a couple years down the road when you are out of that and in something else, I’m sure you’ll think of many ways you could have done something different. But right now, you are in it, so embrace it and enjoy the ride, no one really knows what the hell they are doing anyway.