A Freshman Year Reflection

Freshman year was a roller coaster. The experiences that come with the first year of college life can be incredibly valuable in any sense. If it was a great year, and you worked hard academically, made new friends, and gained great life experiences, these memories will stay with you forever. If this was a bad year for you, and maybe you lost your way, didn’t do as well in your classes, or had some tough times, the way you fought to overcome it can be applied to other areas of life. Whatever the year was for you, I challenge you to reflection on the highs and lows and what brought you to this moment.

The thing about life is that it’s a personal experience for everyone. No person has the same journey. No person approaches a problem the same. No person has the lens in which you view the world. Because of this, it can feel like our journey is an individual one. However through my 19 years of life up until this point, I have seen the human experience shared by everyone. No person is free from the curveball we call life. What you consider your “best years” may happen when you are young, or maybe they take place when you are older. However, I think there is a catch. Whenever you view a phase or point in our life as the best, everything around it is deemed as worst. But at the end of the day, isn’t it still possible to learn from even the worst times?

In our biggest times of downfall in life, it can seem we are at our weakest. When we let these weaknesses perpetuate, it is then that we have given up. In trying to fight every battle, even ones that seem to be lost, we can learn a lot about ourselves, and sometimes, we can even find our strengths. The same can be said for our best moments. When we are thriving, we feel our most productive. We possess an inner confidence that allows us to approach each day fearlessly. It’s the collection of our good and bad times that essentially make us who we are.

Through our mistakes and triumphs, we are still human beings. One of the most important things I’ve come to realize is that we can’t let out highs get too high or let our lows get too low. If we live in a state of constant bliss or one of consistent torture, we can miss out on the most important things in life. There will always be a regression to the mean. Regression to the mean is a term that means things will always even out. No matter how bad things get, or how good…they will always go back to the middle. Whatever your state in life right now, look forward to both the happiness and challenges that life will bring. Surely, we can all come out on the other side. We survived freshman year, right?