just another post about coming back to college

Hello, friends. It’s definitely been a minute since I last posted, or even wrote, for that matter. I’ve been pretty busy with my semester so far and have been so absorbed in all things academic- and work-related. And, of course, in the week between my last post and the first day of the semester, nothing even remotely interesting happened. But then again, being back at school hasn’t been too interesting, either. So here is a little update on my not-quite-interesting life (in 2024!). 

Moving back into my dorm and falling back into my pre-Paris routine has shocked me at its convenience. At the end of last semester, I kept saying how scared I was that all that had changed in me overseas would evaporate as soon as I stepped back on campus. And now, as I write (the first part of) this post from Starbucks (a tradition of Starbucks homework days every Sunday with my friends), I think that fear has now become half-true. In a lot of ways, I truly cannot regress to the person I was before last semester. Or any time in life. That’s just not the way that change and growth works. 

I have a larger perspective on life and culture and the world, but when I’m back at school I feel like all of the change I have been experiencing has dissolved into the vat of small-Christian-college campus life. Everyone and everything is seemingly the same, and that feels debilitating to me. My life was different over there, and now I am facing a new kind of different: my friends are all here and doing a lot of the same stuff we used to do, but now they’ve gotten deeper in their majors or jobs or new friend groups. It reminds me that their growth is just as valid, but it feels so vastly different from my own.

I don’t want to keep talking about the same old stuff (even though I probably will. I am a very repetitive person.). Paris this, Paris that. Change in this area of life, lack of change here. It is the same old stuff. So how do I move on from that, while still keeping the awareness of who I am and what I’ve learned?

We had a little reunion dinner last week with almost everyone, including our program director, her husband, and our on-campus Director of Global Initiatives & Programs (a true mouthful of title). Something that our program director said stood out to me; she said that we should feel disoriented coming back to campus, and if we feel no problem feeling reoriented in our environment, that’s a problem. I think I have a problem. Life truly feels almost the same coming back, between the spring 2023 semester and now.

Campus is the same sleepy place where nothing happens on a Saturday night. Friend groups expand in either freshman or sophomore year, then slowly shrink. Once you get to your second semester of junior year, you hang out with the same three people every day (one being your roommate). You take new classes with the same people from your major. The cafeteria has the same spicy chicken every Thursday. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but it kind of makes life feel insignificant in some ways. I’ve just lived such a rich, busy semester, and now I’m just back to hanging out in dorm rooms on the weekends and picking which days to avoid the cafeteria?

Please don’t get me wrong—I like some of the things that come with this type of life. I love watching movies with my friends (and realizing we accidentally watched the sequel first) and sledding on cafeteria trays down the hill behind the baseball field. Though I complain a lot about the mundanity of it all (both written and spoken), I see a lot of value in the peace my school offers me. But after such a good semester where I was doing something every day of the week, the jump from that semester to this one feels like getting out of a hot shower and stepping into the cold air of the bathroom.

Most of my days consist of class, work, coffee, and homework. Socializing is more often constrained to meal times and classes with friends, leaving me with the feeling that I’m not doing enough. I now feel the weight of my major classes again and the reading that comes with them. Luckily, the literature hasn’t been bad so far. Unluckily, I’m taking a couple of gen-ed classes this semester and I can’t say the textbooks are very enticing.

Side note: I finally made an account on Goodreads. I love it. I’m only on my first book (The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht… so good) but I regularly check the app to see the process of my one and only friend on there. Thank you, Liv. 

I have definitely gone through this kind of period before: slow days, slower nights, studying things I don’t understand, and buying extreme amounts of iced chai to cope. Going through it again forces me to take a step back and sift through memories of the past two years as I try to remember old solutions. Unfortunately, the only thing really sticking out is my past habit of abandoning schoolwork so that I can shift my focus to my social life, which creates a terrible cycle of missing homework and hanging out with my friends, and then becoming a hermit to do all of that missing work. Somehow, I never found a healthy balance between the two. Maybe that could be a delayed New Year’s resolution.

Life has truly just been about figuring out the way around or through the change in semesters, each change being more dramatic than the previous. As I try to finish this post and write some kind of conclusion, I realize that this theme of figuring out change has been the overall theme of my blog. I started it because I felt scatterbrained, hoping that I could get them out onto a document and share on the internet, trying to connect with those who felt the same. But it started with me trying to readjust to being home after sophomore year. Then it was the readjustment to living and studying in Paris. Then living at home. And now, obviously, starting a semester at school again. Even though I have grown a lot, it still feels like an obstacle to overcome. I think I could chalk a lot of that struggle up to constantly changing variables in my environment, like friends, classes, and even the weather.

Side note: I’m writing the last part of this in my Biology lecture. The scientific vocabulary is seeping into my writing.

If I figure out a good method to handle all of this change, you better believe I am going to map it out in a blog post. For anyone struggling with it, of course, but mostly to record that for myself for the next time I struggle with it.

Well, I officially do not know how to end this, as it feels a lot like my first blog post from last year. Another point of regression?? I have no idea.

Thank you for reading this "blah" of a post (as my mother put it). You know that I always appreciate your eyes and minds that read my ramblings. Thanks, friends. Until next time.