I’m taking a second-year class this semester and I think it might be killing me.
It’s not like I haven’t taken classes below my year level before. Last semester, I participated in a first-year seminar where one of the TAs was a friend that I had studied with during my first four years of undergrad. Did it bother me that I was the one taking the class while she was the one teaching it? Most definitely. Every day it reminded me that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be: graduated and off doing new things. That I was behind in life, still in my undergrad when everyone else I knew had moved on. But in trying my best not to think too hard about it, I was able to shove these worries far back into my mind where I hoped I would never see them again.
Unfortunately, this situation is different. Last semester it was easier to hide from. This semester, I’m facing this horrid reality every week.
It’s like when I walk into that classroom, I’m willingly participating in some kind of horrible humiliation ritual — a curse inflicted directly upon me by the gods in an effort to punish me for some horrendous crime I don’t recall committing. It makes me uncontrollably angry. Angry at the world. Angry at my classmates. But mostly, angry at myself.
You see, second year is, arguably, one of the best of your university tenure. You’ve overcome the new and rigorous challenges that test you during your first year. You haven’t yet run into the struggles that come with the overwhelming expectations set for you in third year. And fourth year, the stress of which nearly killed everyone I was acquainted with last year, is still nowhere in sight. Second years live in a perfect middle ground that makes it fairly easy to pick one of them out in a large crowd.
Just from body language alone, I can tell a second-year student from all the rest because they still have life in their eyes. They haven’t been embroiled in the post-secondary system long enough for it to have beat the life out of them.
Maybe that’s what is getting to me the most. I look around my jam-packed lecture hall on a Wednesday afternoon and I see these kids, most of whom are three or four years younger than me, and they look hopeful. Still shiny and new, faces glowing with joy, souls overflowing with hopes and dreams for futures they are still figuring out the logistics of.
It’s devastating.
I know that I used to be like that. I used to love university life, always arriving to class a half an hour early and frequently leaving lecture in a hurry so I could spend the afternoon working diligently in the library with my friends. In fact, I might have even been brighter eyed than they are. But these days, all I do is struggle, pushing myself through hardship after hardship like a container ship dodging icebergs in the Atlantic. I’ve tried to figure out where that version of myself went, but I come up empty every time.
I guess she must have died a long time ago. I don’t think there is a way to get her back.
I imagine there are other people out there who feel this way: stuck, lost and left behind. For those of you who are also experiencing this, I unfortunately don’t have any advice for you. I don’t know how to escape what you are feeling. If I did, I wouldn’t be writing this.
All I can say is that I understand. I understand what it feels like to hate what you’re doing and want to quit. I understand what it feels like to be miserable, stuck in a rut that makes you angry at the world, angry at everyone around you. Angry at yourself. I understand what it is like to avoid campus so that you don’t have to be reminded of the life you lost and the people who left you behind. I get you, and maybe that isn’t the answer to curing your struggles, but maybe, for now, it can be enough. To know that you aren’t alone in all of this.
Even if all those kids in your second-year class make you feel that way.