Hello there, anyone who happens to be reading. To avoid any confusion after that last post, yes, this is the actual creator of this blog and not one of my characters. Just check the text color for quick reference in case of any confusion.
Back to the point…wait, that’s right, I still need one. It’s honestly hard to focus on what I plan to write right now. I’m chalking up my recent blog inactivity to having moved into Syracuse University (go rationalization). As many people would expect (in fact so many people would expect it it’s kind of become cliché) the experience has a lot of things to get used to.
For example, I’ve learned that despite how annoying the people out in the hallways are at midnight during the weekdays, they won’t shut up despite what you say. They’ll carry on shouting and kicking a soccer ball against the walls.
But as a result, I’ve learned the value of soundproof headphones. So I shouldn’t complain much.
I’ve also gained a respectable dislike of stairs. My dorm has the honor of being one of the two that’s stationed all the way at the top of a huge hill. So I go up what I like to call the “123 Trials” at least three times every weekday.
I could go on and on with these anecdotes but that would detract from what I’m still trying to establish as this post’s point. But after spending a little more than two weeks here at college, I’ve actually started to ponder a couple new philosophies related to it.
And as I hear the loud screaming from outside my room, that philosophy is even more apparent to me. It’s what exactly college brings out in a person.
Simply put, it is anything we’ve been hiding in ourselves.
Back at our lovely nests we had lines drawn in front of us by our parents or guardians. Things like not drinking, smoking weed, streaking through the streets, stealing socks from your classmates until they noticed what the hell you were doing, the usual stuff. We may have still done these things (no one there knows I have over fifty socks under my other bed) but the lines were there.
We had restraints on us in some way or another. But college takes that away. No supervision, less lines, and no parents to look over your shoulder or go through your email. Here it’s just a dorm, your wits, and whoever’s on your contact list.
In essence, we go from a tropical jungle with a concerned tour guide to a tour guide that tells you to do your own thing and meet up on holiday weeks. And the second tour guide charges a WHOLE lot more than the second, though we wonder how the hell that’s justified.
Freedom does funny things to people. For those who have seen Dexter’s Laboratory, remember the episode where he sets his robots free? For a while they’re stunned, then express their surprising joy and newfound emotions with a celebration.
Then they’re all promptly run over by a truck. Unfortunately this could still happen here, so don’t let the freedom get to your head too much.
With all this open space and no lines, that also means less walls and feelings of needing to hold back. The limiting walls in our minds that our families have enforced into us become blurred and translucent.
Why is this a big deal? We don’t exactly know what kind of feelings have been behind these walls. But know them or not, they’re going to creep out.
The most obvious feelings that come out are often rebelliousness. People are taking joy in the fall of restraint! Yelling, partying, drinking, sexing, screaming, smashing, kicking, wall jumping, skiing, and even raving shirtless in a dorm room for a huge crowd of people to see! Yes, all this and more have happened! Run through the walls and enjoy the thrill!
Or we’ll have feelings of fear. The safety net is gone and we know that anything we do wrong falls on us. The fall of the walls make us feel like we’re more likely to wander off the right path they had been set around. It’s like driving across a bridge, except the rails along the sides are now gone. Yikes.
Perhaps it’s loneliness. Our family was often a source of comfort we’ve grown accustomed to. Now we’re away from them and thrown amidst huge crowds of other people. The walls going down make us see just how big the world around us truly is and how small we are. We may crave the familiar coziness of family, or struggle to make more friends in this huge new place so we don’t feel like a lone anchovy in the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean combined.
There’s happiness for seeing the greatness of the world around us.
Focus in order to prepare us to take on this huge obstacle course that’s been revealed.
Curiosity and excitement since we’re eager to see what can come of exploring all of this new land!
The feelings go on and on!
To narrow the words down, just think about if you’re standing in your room. You’ve lived in it for years. Think about how you feel in it. Then the walls fall down and you’re suddenly in a totally unfamiliar building full of new people. How would you react? What would you feel when trying to adjust?
Partying, studying, homesickness, depression, ecstasy, love, intelligence, shame, talent, hatred, recklessness, companionship, revelation, compassion, tears, and often anxiety. Some or all of these feelings are present within us in some way. Coming to a place like college draws them out of us since we can’t hide behind those walls anymore.
It’s who we are and our actions, plain and simple. The buck stops with yourself, and when that happens you look at what you’re really made of. What makes us strong and what makes us weak.
Perhaps that’s why the college experience is so important. I came into college with the mindset of finally earning my independence. And in order to do something like that, we need to improve on ourselves.
That’s not possible without seeing our strengths and our weaknesses.
The hardest part is admitting our flaws, since that means admitting we’ve been mistaken all this time and that we were operating under something faulty all that time. This causes lots of anxiety and people will dance around it any way they can to avoid the weight of that.
But in college, avoiding these internal mistakes is a total waste of the experience. Is there any better time and place to honestly see who we are and embrace the opportunity to improve upon it? We’re on the verge of adulthood here, so we should so something mature.
Embrace college by embracing your mistakes and embracing the feelings they will expose. Once you get through it you’ll know exactly what you need to try and change to be successful.
Embrace what’s on the other side of those walls, whatever they may be. Good or bad.
