What happens when “the best years” of your life aren’t what you thought they’d be?

Follow along with me here… your parents drive you out, help you move your stuff into a cube of a room, and then leave you. Alone. In an unfamiliar place. You don’t know your roommate. Not an apartment roommate, but a literal room mate. You have to share a bathroom with at least 20 other people on your floor if not more. Everything that was yours doesn’t really feel like yours anymore. You might know a few people at your new home, or you may not know anyone.

 Things have changed, a lot, and you don’t know how to feel. You want to feel excited and like this next chapter will be your favorite, but will it?

After a weekend full of freshman events, you find yourself starting classes. On the way to your first class, your stomach is filled with butterflies hitting the wall of your stomach in an attempt to escape. Your hands are sweaty and a tad shaky as you attempt to reign them in. Not to mention it’s hot outside. Nine in the morning and there’s sweat dripping down the back of your neck hot. You swear you can see heat radiating off of each person you walk by.

It’s gross and you’re embarrassed to show up to class sweaty and panting from the hill you just climbed (what you don’t realize is everyone is thinking the same thing). Your face is flush, yet you wipe away and hide the sweat as best you can.

Finally, you make it to class thinking you’d be earlier than most people.

Wrong.

Everyone got to the 200-person lecture class early. Attempting to ignore the overwhelming amount of people, you take in the auditorium. Your seat options aren’t your first picks. The very back or the middle of the auditorium are your best options. You settle for the middle.

You have to climb over legs, backpacks, bags, shoes, and metal water bottles. There’s bicycle helmets, notebooks, and trays. Interrupting conversations, hitting laptop screens with your pack back, awkwardly having your back side or front side in someone’s face no matter what you do. Just as you think you couldn’t be more embarrassed by everyone staring at you (they aren’t) the open seat is yours!

It’s syllabus day, aka class is over quick and before you know it, you’re on the way to find your second class. You had mapped out where your classes are over the weekend and walked your schedule one time thinking you’d be fine. Plenty of time to get across campus with a break, everything should go perfectly right? Nope.

You get lost and use Google Maps to navigate you to the next building. Great, another thing to try and hide (so many freshmen do this, it’s ok). You get through your next class, only a few minutes late.

Your stomach growls. Hunger pains come in full force as stress ate away at every calorie you had. You have to do the thing you’ve been avoiding.

Go to the dining hall alone.

*   *   *   *

These are the moments of anxiety so many of us have been through. It’s weird, right? But hundreds of thousands of baby adults (18-year-olds) experience this process every year. They think they’ll be prepared for it all, that the friends they make those first few nights and weeks are their new friends for life. And that might be true for some, but for many it’s not.

These moments are the unspoken ones. The ones that make college sound less than glamorous. 

These are all things I’ve experienced and heard others experience. I wish someone had talked about these awkward, stress-inducing times and clueless feelings before I left for college.

The feeling of being lost while you’re drowning in a sea of students both new and returning. Feeling like just another number, no identity except for the icebreaker ones you’re forced to give yourself the first week of class. I wanted someone to pull me out from the waves, give me a life raft, or cling to a buoy for all I could care for. Something to make me see past the first few weeks and have a newfound stability. But the reality is the sea moves on and you have to make your own raft from whatever you can find. A consistency of classes, waving to everyone in your hall, attending your 8ams, whatever it is that you find stability in.

You can wish for the waves to calm down, for the sea to turn friendly.

BUT the sea was never against you, you just weren’t told how to navigate your new friend. 

And as you push through your first year, you will find a few friends that might be lifelong ones, or you might not. Only time will tell, and that’s completely normal!

While your experience might look different, I’m guessing there are some things that we share in common. I wish I could tell my younger self all of these things and more. College provides you time to learn how to make your raft, and how to rebuild it when you crash.

The sea will always move on, but so will you.