All In This Together

College is exhausting.

Magical three words, aren’t they? Evoking a lot of emotions and memories? Nodding your head vigorously in agreement? It’s a perpetual truth, but a beautiful exaggeration to everyone who’s moved on to more exhausting things in life like taxes and children. But that doesn’t degrade it’s credibility.

Now I don’t mean it’s completely, point blank bad for you, oh never. Somebody once told me growth is a process of breaking down and building up all over again, not just a smooth ascent up the ladder of maturity, and at this point in your life, where everything’s confusing and you don’t know what to do with yourself, the breaking down part gets easier, the building up part gets tougher and finding strength each day to be the best version of yourself is...hard.

As a human being, a social animal, other humans play an important role in your life, and while you can’t always control how big of a role a certain person plays, you can always be cautious and learn to pick yourself up if you ever fall. Because with people you will fall. You’re going to get attached, be happy, have fun, then trip somewhere along the way, get hurt, bleed, lag behind, find a crack in your rose tinted glasses and cry. But like they say, time and tide and ice-cream trucks wait for none so if you don’t want to get stuck in a never ending rut of tears and self pity, get up and hustle. Putting it all behind you is difficult, I know. It seems nearly impossible, but you just have to keep trying and trying until time heals the wounds and your heart embraces the scars that will remain.

Now if you chose to wear the scars with pride and take wisdom from the experience, then you’re all set. Otherwise, you’ll just have ugly scar tissue that’s kind of painful and unpleasant to took at and gives you bad memories that make you spend precious moments of your life dawdling in ‘what if’s and ‘would have been’s.

Not a very productive way to live. Time’s a tickin’.

This is where University life messes with your head by being paradoxical. You get to meet so many new people, out of which you receive warm friendships from some and cold rejections from others, you form bonds which in that moment you’d think will last a lifetime, and the same bonds either shatter in a second or fray away with time as days flow by. You’ll get backstabbed and rescued and protected and murdered in cold blood, maybe all in the same day and honestly, dealing with all that is plain exhausting. Humans are exhausting. Friendships are exhausting. You can’t please everyone, but everyone expects you to please them. Whether you’re a social butterfly or a recluse, you’ll be hoodwinked before you know it.

What I’ve learnt in around six months of living with 35k others like me is that people come and go. Things will always change and nothing will ever be constant as long as time keeps marching on. No matter how you wish the clock would pause, it never does, and while that sucks, the smart thing to do is take your time, a break from reality, but always get up and keep moving in the end.

You’re not perfect, no one ever is. As a perfectionist, as someone who gets too attached too soon and a former people pleaser, I’ll firmly say this: you’re going to make mistakes, and it’s inevitable, and you’re going to have to deal with the fact that not everyone loves you. You cannot please everyone, and you don’t owe it to anybody either. People are going to lie to your face, make you feel amazing, then just toss you aside. It happens, it all happens. And oh God does it suck.

But the only answer is, you just have to take your own time to rejuvenate and when you’re ready, walk ahead. Keep moving. Keep rolling so much the moss wouldn’t even dream of gathering on you. And whenever you think that it’s hard or you can’t, just remember that everybody goes through it. Every. Last. Person.

That’s the beauty of it. This whole journey of growth and development and mental strengthening?

Yeah, we're all in this together.