My first year of college was one of the most mentally challenging years of my life, but I didn’t let it show. Maybe I was embarrassed that I didn’t have it all figured out. Maybe I was scared to show up with difficult feelings as all of my friends went on and on about how happy they were.
I remember a night that I finally felt defeated by loneliness. I crawled into bed by 8 p.m. on a Friday night after eating dinner by myself. I was convinced that there was something wrong with me. I didn’t let myself cry, though.
With vulnerability staring me in the face, I ran the other direction. As loud as my feelings of confusion, sadness, and insecurity were, I turned them down. I assumed that since they were “bad” feelings, it was better to ignore them. A fear of weakness brewed within me, and I mind-over-mattered my wellbeing, denying myself the liberation of sadness as I fell into the deceitful comfort of apathy.
Eventually, it got better, but I still look back on that year of my life and wish that I had allowed myself to feel it.
Now, here I am four years later, living in a city that I am truly happy in. I can see myself being fulfilled here for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that my internal struggles disappear.
I kicked off the year in a solid headspace. I even made a vision board: That’s how confident I was.
Blame it on the early sunsets or the slippery slope of anxiety, but two weeks into the New Year, I found myself face-to-face with the familiar apathy that I had been trying my best to run from. I spent the past two weeks pushing my anxieties and fears away in exchange for going through the motions. That’s the strong thing to do, right?
After a long call with my therapist, where she recommended that I practice mindfulness, I felt relatively hopeless. I have always struggled with “just being,” and to be honest, yoga frustrates me. So I did what I do best instead: I put on my headphones, blasted Celine Dion and went for my daily speed walk.
While my walks are typically a space for me to detach from my busy mind, this one felt different. I looked up and noticed that it was the first night since September that the sun was still out for my post-work walk. I thought back to the girl that picked up and moved across the country in July, and for the first time, I welcomed the fulfilling yet painful satisfaction that arises when you confront how much everything has changed. Before I had a second to process my feelings, tears began to fall. And I let them.
This may seem obvious to someone who’s been through more life than a 22-year-old, but I am just now learning that often, the strongest thing you can do is welcome pain as it comes. For too long, I intellectualized the hard feelings and created a story out of them, convincing myself that I was weak, believing that I could think my way out of the feelings that made me most human.
My days were controlled by unpredictable emotions because I wasn’t empowering myself to feel them. Instead, I was shrinking myself to ignore them. Granting them immense power over my identity without even realizing it.
The other day, I was talking to a friend about confidence and the importance of building it in your early 20s. When I reflected on how I found my confidence, I concluded that “I was simply tired of rejecting myself.” While confidence is often thought to be physical, shamelessly embracing the emotions and pain that I feel daily has transformed how I view myself.
For too long, strength had been reserved for my best moments. And while I’ve had my fair share of highs and milestones over the past few months, as I write this, I am most proud of my redefined sensitivity when times get hard.
As much as it is preached on social media, I disagree with the notion that we should appear “unfazed” when something or someone hurts us. And I disagree that we need to “fake it ‘til we make it” when we feel tough emotions rising to the surface.
When we reject our own sensitivity, we disrespect ourselves, putting others' expectations over our own truth.
My message to anyone reading this is that painful moments in time in no way signify that you are headed in the wrong direction. After the challenges of my first year of college, I met people who I will cherish for the rest of my life, and discovered new passions that lit me on fire. I simply wish that I hadn’t been so hard on myself as I was figuring it all out.
As I get older, I realize that most of life happens in between our greatest moments.
It takes practice, but I now know that I am not defined by the pain that I feel. When I embrace all parts of being human, my confusion, loneliness, and struggles do not write my story. Instead, my sensitivity is now my trusted guide, pointing me towards parts of myself that I have yet to listen to.
It’s exhausting pretending to be half of a human. Strength is not black and white: We flourish when we welcome ourselves with grace and allow our sensitivity to teach us what apathy cannot.
It's always cool to visualize how much you have grown :o (similar jean taste though)
College Freshman (rarely cries) (18) Post Grad Year 1 (cries a lot lol) (22)
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