If there’s one thing no one has ever called living through a pandemic, it’s easy. Coping with the pandemic during a major life change- say, moving a thousand miles away to go to college- sometimes seems almost impossible. If you ask any Wellesley first year what their college experience has been like so far, they’ll probably all come up with one word: isolating.
This might only be my second blog post, but I already feel obligated to give you the complete and total truth about my Wellesley experience. Honestly? It’s been really, really hard.
When I used to think about my first year of college, I pictured myself staying up all night debating the merits of oatmeal raisin cookies with my roommate, belting my heart out to “America the Beautiful” with the rest of the Wellesley student body at Stepsinging, and walking around Lake Waban on Sunday mornings with my best friends, breathing in the fresh morning air. I thought everything about it was going to be perfect, because I was where I was meant to be, with the people who dreamed just as big as I did and worked just as hard as I did. The hard part was over; I had chosen the right school, Wellesley had chosen me back, and I was going to ride off into the sunset on a canoe on Lake Waban.
Unfortunately for me, college in practice is not quite as easy, breezy, and beautiful as college in theory. Most of my daydream scenarios would be completely irresponsible and unsafe during the current state of things, and finding my home away from home hasn’t been the immediate success I’d thought it would be. I spend most of my time studying and watching She-Ra alone in my dorm, missing Iowa and my family. I wonder if I’m ever going to be able to feel grounded here when everything is so completely opposite from the only place I’ve ever called home. Some days, I wonder if I made the right choice to start my college career out like this, if I should have tried remote learning or even applied for a gap year. Even if I wasn’t getting to spend my first year on campus, at least I wouldn’t be so alone.
Now, right now you might be thinking “Wow, that all sounds horrible, and I’m kind of regretting reading your downer blog”. You’re right; it’s a very pessimistic and sad picture of my life at Wellesley so far; thankfully, it’s not the only way of looking at things.
On Wednesday last week, I was having a bad day. Not just an ordinary bad day, either; I was tired, I was lonely, I was homesick, and I spent the entire day on the verge of tears that I just didn’t have time to cry. I felt lost, like I didn’t belong here and I didn’t know what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be, either at Wellesley or just in my life. I was so stressed out that I almost skipped the Zoom meeting I had planned to go to that evening, but at the last minute I decided to take a break from my anthropology readings to attend a forty-five minute heartspace meeting.
For those of you who might not be familiar with heartspace, it’s a student-run organization on campus with roots in Unitarian Universalism that generally serves students who identify as spiritual but not necessarily religiously inclined and are looking for a space to process, feel, and connect with other students in a space that is less head and more heart (hence the name heartspace).
Part of heartspace meetings is an open sharing session, where students can share any joys or sorrows they had experienced throughout their week. Being in my sad, grumpy, mad-at-the-world miserable mood, I immediately started parsing through the absolute worst moments of my week to pick the best one to share. I anxiously waited for my turn, all fired up and ready to rant, only to find that everyone else was sharing the exact same thing.
This kind of stopped me in my tracks; here I was, sitting in my desk chair and pouting about how no one could understand how lonely I was, how much I missed home, how much I felt like I didn’t fit in and I was never going to be able to make a home here at Wellesley, and while I had been spending all of that time letting those angry thoughts stew around in my brain, I had completely ignored the fact that I wasn’t doing this alone. In fact, while I was whining about how hard my life is right now, I totally forgot that not only am I not the only one going through all of this isolation and adjustment, but that there are over six hundred other students on campus right at this moment who are dealing with problems that are almost completely identical to my own!
Having gained this new perspective, I cast aside my list of “most important sorrows to share”, and decided to start looking for a joy. I was surprised by how quickly one came to mind: that morning I had received mail from someone very important to me back home, and it had made me so happy to realize that the people I loved were still thinking about me when I was a thousand miles away. Now, over a week later, I realize how dramatic my feelings of being alone were when I had people over a thousand miles away still reaching out and caring for me. As a new adult, I’m still learning how to put my feelings into a bigger perspective, and I think it’s okay to get a little into my own head sometimes. The best thing about Wellesley is that something is always happening here; no matter how deep I get into my catastrophic sad thoughts about “losing” my freshman year and never finding a place here at Wellesley, there’s always something around the corner to remind me that none of that is the case.
So no, times at Wellesley are not always “Swellesley” all the time; this is only my first month on campus, and I know that every step of the road ahead will not be easy. In my pit of wallowing and sadness in the past couple weeks, I had forgotten one very important thing: I didn’t come to Wellesley because I wanted everything to be easy and happy-go-lucky all the time. I came to Wellesley because I wanted to learn and I wanted to grow, and that can’t happen if I don’t have to deal with challenges. Granted, these challenges might be a little bigger than those a first year would face in a typical year, but that little bit of extra strife will only serve to make me stronger and kinder in the end. To be completely cliché, times are tough, but I’m going to be tougher. When I feel like I’m spending too much time in my dorm, I’m simply going to put on my mask and walk out. When I feel lonely, I’ll text my blockmates, find a meeting on campus, or reach out to someone new to get to know each other. When I miss home, I’ll call my mom and write letters to my grandparents and watch Field of Dreams in bed. Most importantly, when I’m feeling sad and miserable and angry at the world, I’m going to stop and take a minute to remind myself all I have to be grateful for, and all of the beautiful things in my life that came out of times of struggle. It’s like that saying, “Be the change you want to see in the world”; sometimes, we have to be the change we want to see in our own lives.
Remember to advocate for yourself this week, and try to put your sorrows into perspective; there are too many people on this Earth for you to ever be alone in what you’re feeling. Reach out, and you might be surprised by what you find!
Sending you joy,
A
I took my own advice and wrote this post outside in the quad!