What does it mean to be a college student? Is it what the media portrays? An overworked, stressed out student, hell bent on getting a degree that will only cost them thousands of dollars of debt. Or, maybe, it’s the college student who’s living the dream; going out every night, getting straight A’s and loving life in every way possible! From the responses I gathered from my friends during this assignment, it’s far from either of those portrayals.

First, I asked my friend Rachel about how she was feeling, she said she was conflicted. She then proceeded to tell me about how she loved her friends, new boyfriend and classes but she was still stressed and obviously hated chemistry. Ok, I thought, let’s ask someone else, surely, they’ll have something more to add. The rest of my responses went something like this “I’m fine just tired”, “I’m conflicted”, “I’m stressed because I have a lot of work to do and didn’t get anything done this weekend but, otherwise, I’m good!”. These responses seemed to possess a common trend; they were all relaying a mix of different emotions, not just one. I anticipated comments like “I’m drowning in work” or “I have ten essays and 2 lab reports due tomorrow”. But, Shockingly, their responses were much tamer, they were almost boring. Their responses weren’t devastatingly negative or over the top optimistic. They didn’t rave about what an amazing time they were having in college, but they also weren’t collapsing under their circumstances; their responses happened to fall somewhere in between.

Something that I and probably many others struggle with, is the ability to resist generalizing experiences or viewing things in an extreme light. When I started this project, I anticipated responses that were either an idealist, optimistic representation of their feelings or a frazzled, depressed outlook on things.

Living in such a complex and scary world isn’t something easy for many people to do. We always want things to be easy, whether they be emotions, experiences or any of the other complexities that arise just from existing. Just like it would be easier to fix the world’s problems if everyone suffered from the same issues, this paper would have been much easier to write if everyone’s responses had been saturated in drama and simple, but people are complex. No one is ever just good or bad, happy or sad, or black and white. While we may express one emotion over the other, there are always a million underlying factors that influence our overall health. Understanding that we need to address all the small parts of ourselves and all the complex reasons for our behaviors and emotions can guide us into a place of better mental and physical wellbeing. While this may seem like I’m reading into my friends’ comments too much, it was jarring for me to realize how different their responses were from the ones I anticipated at the start.