I’ve been going through a strange time. When I began my freshman year, I was in quite a confused state while drifting through the brand-new world of college — making new friends, starting new classes, being unable to see my family, living on my own, ending old relationships, starting new ones and a host of other things. It’s been chaotic, beautiful and so entirely stressful.
I thought that, by this time, the confusion and weariness of having no direction would have faded. It didn’t.
Over the last month, I found myself despairing over the uneasy and unsure feelings I was having. It would have been an appropriate reaction if it was only short-term, but it endured for quite a while.
After all, my grades are less than stellar, and I’ve always been an excellent student. The clinical insomnia I’ve been struggling with since September of last year has not resolved, and the referral appointment I made for a sleep specialist still isn’t for another two weeks. This likely implies that I will be handling exam season without any worthwhile treatment.
I still don’t have my living situation planned out with my friends for the next year of school. I’ve just started a new job in addition to my current position as a columnist. I scheduled a load of STEM and honors courses for the fall semester that I have no idea whether or not I can handle in light of the above.
It’s been so disconcerting, and it’s made me question my worth.
How could I not when so many of my friends have everything figured out? How could I not when everyone on the internet seems to have it figured out? Perfect grades, careers, schedules, relationships, bodies, personalities, their lives in general. It feels like they have it all.
Or so it seems.
At the end of the day, we really only see what people want us to see, as it is human nature to hide the unsavory parts of our lives. We don’t want other people to know what’s wrong with us — the things we don’t know, the things we aren’t good at, the things that seem strange or unruly or irresponsible — because being found out presents the possibility that we’ll be looked down upon, pitied, made fun of or all three.
That’s what I’ve been struggling with lately, and it was really distorting my self-image for a while.
Over Easter weekend, however, I found myself looking at things a little differently. I was surrounded by family and friends at my Uncle Ricky and Aunt Belinda’s annual crawfish boil, and no one was concerned with what I hadn’t accomplished or hadn’t planned out yet.
Instead, I found myself surrounded by loved ones curious about how I was doing, people who wanted to offer comfort, advice and tidbits about the things they themselves had been struggling with. I was surrounded by people who didn’t have things quite figured out and were able to shirk those things off for a day of joy, and it truly revitalized me.
So, I decided I wanted to share all of the things that I haven’t quite figured out yet in hopes that you might find solace in knowing that someone else is messing up a lot too, that we all are messing up all of the time. I’m coming to find that adulthood really is just a constant state of confusion, and that it is perfectly okay to be confused as long as you refuse to drown in it.
We are all experiencing life for the first time at the same time, and in a lot of ways, we stay kids trying to grow and learn and understand for our entire lives. Confusion is just a part of the process, a fleeting and sometimes returning feeling that we just need to let pass through us.
As the great Scottish novelist J.M. Barrie once wrote, “We are all failures, at least, the best of us are.”
It’s okay not to know where you’re going, not to have everything figured out. Everything will happen in its own time, and the best you can do sometimes is to take a deep breath and keep moving.
Riley Sanders is a 19-year-old biology major from Denham Springs, La.
