A More Realistic View of College
When you’re young, you have all these preconceptions about college being an awesome party, and sometimes, it really is. Before college, I heard stories from my two older sisters, and I would see my older friends posting happy pictures on Instagram. Social media made it seem like college was the perfect social setting. People act like it’s always so easy to adjust to college life and that meeting new friends comes naturally to everyone.
But it’s so much more complicated than that, and I wish I’d known that going in.
According to the article “Facing the College Mental Health Crisis: The Need for More Faculty Training“ by Samantha L. Solomon, college students are facing a mental health crisis: “Specifically, rates of anxiety and depression are on the rise. The most recent survey by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors reports that 58.9% of students who visit college counseling centers have anxiety, making it the top mental health concern for the eighth year in a row” (1). I struggled with feelings of extreme loneliness during my first semester at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I found it incredibly difficult to connect with others. By the time I was ready to engage socially, I felt like everybody had already formed their groups, and that really discouraged me.
I decided to name this collection Are These the Greatest Years? because I caught myself asking this question over and over again throughout my time at UIUC. Adjusting to college was a lot harder than I expected, and I was crushed when I realized my own experience was nothing like those glossy pictures I had seen online. To me, these poems capture the complex emotional spectrum of my time in undergrad, which is also shown through the titles of each section. When writing this book, I thought about my emotions like my own version of the characters from the movie Inside Out: naive, lost, frustrated, impatient, inadequate, manipulated, confused yet accepting, and content. Although my emotions were overwhelming at times, there was also beauty in them, and I often thought of them as poetic. This inspired me to choose poetry over prose for this collection. Identifying how I was feeling in a certain moment and writing about it helped me in ways that I’m still processing today. While I’ve been writing poetry since high school, I’ve never heard about these topics from this perspective. I felt inspired to change the narrative on behalf of so many college students who suffer in silence.
Mental health has been so important to me in my life. Starting my sophomore year of high school, I began feeling incredibly overwhelmed in the simplest of social situations. I ignored these feelings for the entirety of high school under the assumption that this was how growing up was supposed to feel. When I started college, however, I realized that I could not ignore these feelings anymore. Utilizing campus resources, I started doing group therapy in January during my second semester of freshman year. Whether positive or negative, I truly think that everybody has the right to their own feelings. This generation is powerful, but to truly make a change, we need to start talking openly about mental health, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. To those who struggle with anxiety and depression, you are so much more than a mental illness, and you are so much more than a number of likes on a social media platform. Even if you don’t believe it, I do — I believe that you can get past this.
Although I graduated a year early and I’m done with college now, I’m still feeling a bit lost, and that’s OK. To anybody feeling a little lost, I hope my words mean something to you. If you’re a college student, I hope you enjoy this book, that it makes you feel seen and understood, and that it helps you see and understand those around you more clearly. I also hope this collection gives high schoolers and their parents a more realistic idea of what to expect when it’s time to experience this stage of life. If I can help one person with my work, that would make it all worthwhile to me. This collection has allowed me to be my most authentic self, and I hope it can inspire you to do the same.
Your voice matters. There’s so much beauty in using it to tell your story. I hope you listen to mine.
-DR
- Solomon, Samantha L. “Facing the College Mental Health Crisis: The Need for More Faculty Training.” Best Colleges, 2 February 2020. https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/facing-the-college-mental-health-crisis/
Over the next weeks, I will be sharing college tips and advice as well as excerpts and stories from my book, Are These the Greatest Years? in this article series. Are These the Greatest Years? launched on July 29, 2020 on Amazon. Here is the link to buy it!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08DTJMMTQ/
If you want to connect, you can reach me here via email dominicrose50@gmail.com or connect with me on social:
TikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJTqVtdH/
