What I Now Know: Stop Trying to Control the Universe

It was a Sunday morning. Teary-eyed and almost in a haze, I walked down the aisle in my nude high heels with my shining silver cap and gown as the “Pomp and Circumstance” graduation march played on.

“You’ll only experience this once in your life,” my chemistry professor had whispered to me right before I took the first step into the auditorium.

In that moment, I took a look around the room and took the deepest, most profound breath I had ever taken. The room wasn’t as bright or as crowded as I had expected. I couldn’t see a world outside of the experiences and the people that had convened in that room, on that day, and yet I had signed a deposit for an entirely new world just a few weeks before.

In a few months, I’d be starting school at St. John’s University in New York.

On August 22, 2015, I boarded a plane with my mom and headed to New York. I had never been away from my parents for more than three nights, and I was about to become a resident and student at a school I had visited just once, in a borough I had visited once, with people I had never met.

To say “I was anxious” would be an understatement.

I was the only one in my friend group — and in my small graduating class — who would be making such a dramatic transition into college. Still, I was hopeful. I never entertained thoughts of disaster, or even worse — a less-than-great dining hall.

However, things never go quite the way I expect.

I expected to thrive and I did not. I expected to make a lot of friends and I did not. I expected to be happy and I was not.

I couldn’t let go of the life I thought I had left behind, the life I suddenly thought I had failed at. My friends from home, who I loved like family, didn’t understand what I was going through. They didn’t know, and maybe didn’t even care how much I needed them.

My “new beginning” was suddenly tainted with fears and anxieties of the past, and this notion set the foundation for my freshman year at college.

Depression was a foreign concept to me. Of course, I had felt sad before, but I had never felt this kind of sad — the kind of sad that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. It felt like I constantly had a hole in the pit of my stomach. I dreamed about being back at home, only to wake up to two unfamiliar roommates and a screaming resident assistant down the hall. I never wanted to get out of bed. When I wasn’t in class or doing homework, I was sleeping. I lost 15 pounds. I was in the greatest city in the world and nothing amused me, not even the thrill of taking the subway for the first time or pointing out the cutest boy in my philosophy class.

After one too many days of crying my tear ducts dry, I began to let go. Quite frankly, I didn’t have another choice. I put all of my energy towards taking every positive opportunity that presented itself in front of me and yelled to myself, “Hey, maybe I can help.”

I made a really great friend who helped me through it all and who became my rock, my biggest supporter, my favorite dining hall date. When I was in my room, in the dark, at 3 p.m., which happened frequently, he would come in, turn on the light, and remind me, “Carolina, you need to get up.”

My friend once took me to the High Line public park on Manhattan’s West Side and listened while I cried on one of the wooden benches. I told him I just couldn’t understand why this was happening to me. He never had answers, but he had encouraging eyes, and ears that listened, and that was enough. One time, I told him the version of myself that he knows isn’t the best version of myself —it actually isn’t even close. In a letter he later slipped under my door, he told me that it was the only version of myself he’d ever like to know, because it was a version of myself that was strong.

Last winter was the coldest, both literally and metaphorically, but I survived. And by February I had really let it all go: the failing friendships back in my hometown, my ideas of what college would be like, and the notion that I could control everything that happened to me.

I’m still reaping the benefits of that turning point, although I don’t exactly know what prompted it, and I’m still trying to figure out everything I’ve learned.

There are still days that hurt. There are still times when I want to run home, and there are times when I have. There are few things that compare to having the comfort of your own room, your sibling, your closest friend — and the pain felt in the absence of those things is often overlooked.

But now I realize it’s okay to miss something and to not necessarily want it back, to allow yourself to admire it from a different angle, in a different way. It is only by doing this that I’ve been able to grow more into myself than I could have ever imagined.

Through this experience, I’ve learned about a million of the greatest lessons of my life.

Last year, I read a quote by author Gordon B. Hinckley during a dark, sleepless night in my residence hall. It summed everything up nicely:

“In my ninety-plus years, I have learned a secret. I have learned that when good men and good women face challenges with optimism, things will always work out. Despite how difficult circumstances may look at the moment, those who have faith and move forward with a happy spirit will find that things always work out.”

So I went ahead and did just that.

Now I have people, both at St. John’s and at home, who I know love me. I’m 50 credits into a major I love, and I very rarely find myself in my dorm alone at 3 p.m. with the lights off. I have a long way to go, but I’m now in a position where I can acknowledge and appreciate how far I’ve come. And that’s important.

I’m no longer friends with the friend who used to be my biggest supporter. A series of unfortunate events led to our breakup. Still, if I hadn’t harshly discovered in my freshman year that some things in life just don’t work out — and that sometimes the universe simply breaks promises of forever without rhyme or reason — I would not have been able to move forward from him, from us. I also would have missed a lot of greater opportunities for happiness yet again.

Life will never look at me and say, “Ok, she’s had enough. Let’s give her a break.” And although I can’t control that, I can control the way I deal with it, and that makes all the difference.