College: The Loneliest Place in the World
Imagine you are about to start college at your dream school, or the one that your parents can afford (the latter option for most of us.) You are so excited to make new friends, engulf yourself in new experiences, and find your maximum capacity for intelligence. The night before your first day, you can barely sleep. You arrive, and everything feels new, exciting, scary, and overwhelming. The work load seems impossible, but you will soon realize that you are very capable of completing it (with Google’s help, of course). You make no friends for weeks, for months. You become discouraged.
You are finally invited to hang out with a group of individuals you barely know, but hey, who gives a fuck? You’re young, ambitious, and ready to say yes to anything.
You’re there, only 19-years old, and you are surrounded by drugs and alcohol. Again, who gives a fuck? You’re invincible. But wait, the more you drink, the lonelier you feel. Where are your friends? You know, the ones you just met — the ones that invited you here? They are not your fucking friends, says the voice of truth in your head. Young, horny men foam at the mouth while looking at your body… a body that you neither feel comfortable nor attractive in. You cower at the sight of their sexually intense gaze.
“Here” a stranger says, one that is nothing more than a shadow in the darkness illuminated by strobe lights.
“Take a puff, it’ll help you relax.” You breathe in a bitter taste of air. It makes your lungs feel like marshmallows burning to a crisp over an open fire. You cough like you have tuberculosis; you can either panic or relax. It all depends on your mindset, but you learn the hard way that you are one of those unfortunate souls that reacts berserkly to the delicate kiss of sweet Mary Jane. Suddenly, your vision shrinks to the size of a pin hole as you start to black out. Nothing makes sense anymore, but did anything even make sense sober? You don’t know — you can’t remember. You drive home because you don’t know any better, but the cops do.
“Eee-ooo, Eee-ooo.”
Red and blue lights are blaring in the darkness behind you. You wonder, Is it the fourth of July? Are those fireworks? Where the fuck am I? Well, you have been sitting in your totaled car for about two hours, partially connected to a tree. You just spent $3,000.00 on this bright yellow, used, Jeep Wrangler that your Uncle Bob wanted you to earn, bought with a combination of graduation money and the minimum wages you slaved for while working a dead-end job at a local gas station.
“Ma’am can I see your ID? Do you know why I am pulled over beside you tonight?” No… no. I … what?
Waiting for your mother and father to meet you at the jail and witness the process of your first DUI may be more humiliating than if you dropped out of school to become a stripper (at least you would have had a choice in that one). As they look at you in pure disgust and disappointment, you’re tempted to say, “At least I didn’t kill anyone…” At this point, it is all you really have to be thankful for. Great job!
Fast forward to senior year because, let’s be honest, everyday is the same, and after your first fucked up night in college, you either get fucked up again or go to bed early. There’s no in between. You somehow managed to graduate with honors and a 4.0 GPA. How so? Is it because you’re so smart? Hell no, it is because the curriculum was cheap, although your loan debts express otherwise. It is also because you lost sleep every night due to the intense fear that anything below perfection would screw you out of gaining the career of your dreams. But once you receive your degree, you are confused as to why everyone seems so overjoyed. All you see written on that pricey piece of paper is, “Congratulations! You sat through hours of opinionated bullshit and did meaningless tasks for four years! Good luck finding a fucking career that you probably won’t even like!” So much for that 4.0 anyway; you’ll come to find that every job requires at least five-to-eight years of prior work-related experience that you can’t ever obtain because no one will give you a chance.
But wait…
You did get a job in your field. Remember? Your internship site hired you! But, oh no, you hate it. If you hate it now… just wait 10 more years. What do you do about it? All the chances you had to change your mind are gone, and Mom and Dad expect you to earn that doctorate degree as soon as possible so they can post pictures of it on Facebook, almost as a way to say, “Fuck you!” to all their friends with less accomplished children. And even worse, Grandma didn’t fight for her rights as a woman to watch you throw it all away by not being interested in graduate school anymore, and believe me, she will spend the rest of her life reminding you how disappointed she will be if you don’t continue with your education. “This field just isn’t for me… and it sucks that I’m just now realizing it,” is what you tell them, but they all disapprove of your indecisiveness, and you fall into a spiral of depression.
So, there you have it. College in a nutshell. Everyone says, “College is truly the time of your life! It’s a time where you find yourself among the crowd.” I say, “I’ve never felt so far away from who I was until I went to college. It’s the loneliest place in the world.”