When I was in high school I thought that it was going to be the best time of my life. I thought I was ready to be an adult. Ha, nope.
Little by little I started understanding what being an adult in college really is. It’s filling out tax forms, and financial aid forms. It’s calling your mom at 10:00pm because you can’t remember whether the darks go with warm water or cold water, and asking if spaghetti sauce stains. It’s about finding a job because how else are you going to finance the hemorrhage of money during textbook season.
Pretty sobering, huh? Well I guess I’m making it seem a tad more awful than it probably is but that’s just because I’m feeling a little sassy tonight.
Anyway, college also allows room for exploration and fun in every sense of the word. You are put in a variety of situations that award you with tiny insights about yourself. Had I not gotten lost in Boston that one time, then I wouldn’t know that I am embarrassingly obsessed with Panera’s Napa Chicken Salad Sandwich (don’t hate it ‘til you try it). College is full with pockets of experiences like that.
You also make different friends. This process was actually the toughest for me. I go to school almost 3000 miles away from the place that I call home. I thought that I would be able to hold onto the friends that I dearly loved but unfortunately I learned that it is a quite difficult to maintain those long distance friendships. It’s nobody’s but our agenda’s fault. We are all so busy that it is so sadly easy to allow our friends to fall at the bottom of the priority list and then out of the picture forever. I know this sounds pretty grim and sad but there’s a bright side to it. In college we make friends in the line of battle, and as Hollywood movies will have us believe the truest friends are always made in the worst of situations. You’ll find more often than not that your struggle buddies will become your closest friends.
College is also a period of different kinds of growth. Through a variety of situations, we are made to dig deep and be honest with ourselves. Growing pains is actually thing, I’ve come to find. Growth hurts, it’s not all picture perfect. We’ll get super frustrated with the world and ourselves whilst in college but when we rise out of that we were all the more invincible.
As first generation students in college I think that is our defining hallmark: invincibility. We have already come so far, fought against so much, that the only way we now know is forward.