Freshman Realizing They Broke out of Their Shell for Nothing
It’s no secret that life has changed imminently for all college students these past two months. Seniors are moping about how they can’t have a sense of finality to their last four years of absolutely wrecking their livers. Juniors are coping with the fact they might not intern this summer as an NBC page—as if they even had the connections. Sophomores might be perfectly fine; they’ve had a full year to discover what clubs were right for them (Pots) and what university clubs were wrong for them (Film Club). That’s a perfect year to shed their high school skin and make a family out of the friends that they use purely as alcohol plugs. But undoubtedly, freshmen are the ones who have it the worst. They are spending the final two months of their first college year regretting who they became after busting out of their shell to try new things, the worst of which was definitely youth group.
“I don’t know who I am anymore. When I look in the mirror of my childhood bedroom, I only see the girl who finally started fake flirting with people at parties by joining the comedy crowd. It’s revolting! I gave up Netflix, half my virginity and my entire clearance-rack-at-Urban wardrobe to just come back home?” said Jessica James as she let her tears fall onto a framed picture of a vaguely familiar but ultimately dead person: her high school self, pictured in full graduation regalia. “How does one lose their recently gained confidence in self-isolation? I need to go back to the person I used to be--the one that my mom would have to coax and bribe to brush my hair before going anywhere public.”
“No one warns you of the dangers of breaking out of your shell. I didn’t know that I’d regret joining a comedy troupe or that the so-called ‘skills’ I learned in improv would be useless at home with my mother and father who don’t understand alternative entertainment,” said Mac Bannerman while he depressingly responded to eight different high school group chat convos that were on their way to their natural death before they became the only friends within a 100-mile radius. “I deleted my Facebook after I realized I wouldn’t be getting any invites to house parties or shows for a while, but what does that matter when I already made ten new friends this year! I became a new, well-rounded person during my short stint as an on-campus freshman, and I’m actively coping to understand that it’s undoable. I’ll never be able to play Minecraft for eight hours straight again. Adults were right, life is hard.”
The hardest part about this tragic situation for freshmen is having to go back home to their families who will have major trouble adapting to the student’s newfound lifestyle of drinking every day and verbally communicating. The son who had expressed his dissatisfaction with what was for dinner in grunts and sighs now uses words! The comfy shell in which freshmen navigated the home terrain before college has been shattered and it will take a couple more months of isolation for parents to quit stepping on the jagged shell shards by gasping when their child answers a friend’s phone call without leaving the room.