College 101

I had to write this thing for this thing and the prompt was "what mistakes did you learn as a freshman and what advice would you give to a freshman based on these mistakes?"

My answer is here. It's the perfect Lana mixture of cheesy and unbelievably wordy. Also, confusing. That is why I'm posting it here -- it's ME! Love ya XOXO etc etc.

For three weeks, I refused to be alone. I sacrificed sleep to hang out with potential new friends; I gave people I didn’t like a second chance (and then a third and fourth and fifth). I pushed and pushed my worn out, confused and overwhelmed freshman body.

It was a little ridiculous actually. My eyes would be burning from lack of sleep or I would be with a group of people who just weren’t for me and, yet, I would say to myself, “These could be them: my new best friends. My ‘college friends.’ If I leave now, I will have no friends and will be alone forever.” What did I tell you? Ridiculous. However, it was the beginning of college, and I didn’t know anybody or any better. Worst of all, nobody told me it was acceptable to be alone, nobody told me that the stereotype of college was false -- that nothing is fun all of the time, that nothing is “the time of your life” all of the time. I entered college with an idea of how college was supposed to be and whenever it didn’t coincide with my college experience, I felt isolated, so I refused to be alone. Let me be frank, the first three weeks of college were horrible.

Eventually, however, I learned the error of my ways. I let it slip to potential new friend #124 (currently my roommate and great friend) that I was having a rather terrible time, and in that blessed moment when a person goes from an acquaintance to a friend, she said, “Really? Oh, thank God. Me too.” And there it was, the first dose of medicine for my loneliness, the first step so necessary for good friendship: the admission that life isn’t perfect, especially not college life, and that we all struggle sometimes.

As time went on, I took this first step with many who are my great friends today. I learned again and again that people would rather be comforted than impressed by you, and that this is the nature of making true friends. In a matter of weeks, my college experience went from horrible to joyful.

I so passionately believe in this, what I learned last year, that whenever I happen upon a freshman, I tell them these things. They find it rather strange (who wouldn’t? It’s more of self-help book jargon than polite conversation), but I tell them anyway. I tell them in the hopes that, once they learn it for themselves, they will know to tell others and the freshman to come. I tell them in the hopes that this “college life is perfect” idea will be broken down and replaced with a more realistic and comforting idea, that college is a time in which you learn more than you knew to start with and that to learn these things, especially when from people, you have to be exactly and only everything that you are.