Not For The Faint Of Heart

College is not for the faint of heart.

You have been away at college for months now. You are two hours from home in a place unfamiliar and new, surrounded by people you have never met, people who have come from so many different walks of life that ypu can't even begin to comprehend. Living with roommates that you have to deal with no matter how much you love or hate them. Watching your bank account slowly drain away because you still take those early morning Starbucks runs, but you have no time to work.

So you make time. Between the studying and exams, the Welcome Weekends and the football games, the visits home and the long times you don't see your family, you make time. You squeeze in a four hour shift at a facility that is a half hour away, because those on-campus jobs pay you the least they can, which seems wrong given you have emptied your pockets and are in thousands of dollars of debt to go to their institution. The least they could do is pay you a decent salary.

You trade those home cooked meals and family nights at your favorite restaurant for three meals a day at a dining hall, where the pizza is greasy, the carbs are high, the fruit is too ripe or not ripe enough, the salad dressings are usually empty, and the one good thing in the place is the self serve ice cream machine. But it is usually broken.

You learn for the first time that you can't hold your alcohol. You learn that when you are doubled over a toilet while the music blares from outside that dorm hall public bathroom, where anyone can watch you at your weakest moment, because the stalls are so small that you can't crouch over a toilet and close the door. You learn very quickly not to ever drink that much again.

You give up your large bedroom and bathroom that you had for yourself to live in a quad, using a public bathroom, where girls leave their tampons in the shower, and odds are, about three fourths of the toilets are clogged, sometimes not even by things that should ever be in a toilet. You try to fit a lifetime of clothes and makeup and shoes and bedding and school supplies and memories into a 11x10 area, and pray to God that it isn't overlapping into someone elses.

Remember that smoke alarm that your parents dismantled when you were about 7? You fondly remembered it the 5th time the fire alarm went off at precisely 3:54 in the morning, because someone on the floor above you decided it would be really fun to play with a fire extinguisher. And the time before that was about 12:30 at night, and that was the second time it went off because of vapor fumes.

But, amidst all this new and unfamiliar territory, something amazing happens.

Your first day at work, you find that many people there go to the same college as you. You studied really hard for that first exam, because you promised yourself you would do better than you had done the rest of your life, and you get a 93. Your first football game you line the field for the freshman tunnel, and you realize that no one else around you has life figured out either, but you can figure it out together. You go to that dining hall with food that you aren't used too, and you lean over and start talking to a random stranger, and today, that stranger is your friend. You move in with these new girls, and find that they have so many stories to share and advice to give and laughs to share, and in a matter of days you feel like you have known them a lifetime. When you stood outside in the early hours of the morning, with sirens blaring and lights flashing, you shared an experience with all these other people, one that you can tell stories about, something you can bond over.

I guess what I am saying is this:

You can make something good out of something bad. If you don't like something, change it. If something doesn't go right, fix it.

College is not for the faint of heart, and that is why I know I can do it.

#College #roommates #studying #home