I have to be honest with you. Not that I haven't been honest all this time, but there have been some things I have glazed over in my college story. I've told you how hard it was for me to move in and leave my family, I've told you about the crazy Friday nights, and everything in between. But I think I need to tell you a little bit more. So here it goes...
From what I can remember of September, I'm pretty sure I cried every day. I would cry every time I talked to my mom on the phone (which was at every second of the day), and she asked me every time, "Do you want to come home?" I kept saying "No," and I didn't even know why. The months passed, and I can't say I was completely happy being away at college. It was difficult to make friends and hard to be away from my family. The academics were the easy part. I found solace there, throwing myself head-on into every project my classes passed my way. But I still wasn't thrilled to be where I was.
And as the months passed, my mom continues to ask me if I wanted to leave. She told me that there was no shame in deciding that living at college was not the thing for me, and that no one would be upset or disappointed if I decided to leave. But I still said I wanted to stay.
Second semester came, but nothing really changed besides the classes I was taking. It was still hard for me to leave my family, and I still cried every time I left my family to go back to school. And yet, I kept saying that I wanted to stay.
I wondered why it was that I wanted to stay, and keep putting myself (and my family) through all of this. And then I remembered the day I got accepted to this school. I did not expect to even get into the school, let alone get the size of the scholarship that I got. This school was not even my top choice (I didn't have a top choice), but I cried. To this day, I don't know why I cried, but I do know how I felt. I felt like I was supposed to be at that school. I believed that I was meant to be there, that I wouldn't have gotten accepted to the school or gotten that scholarship if I wasn't supposed to be there.
I think I carried this feeling with me through all of the times my mom asked me if I wanted to leave, and all of the times I thought about leaving. Every time I thought that leaving was the right decision, that little voice in my soul rose up and seemed to tell me "You are in the right place. This is it." And I believed it.
And as if by some weird magic, something would always happen as if to validate that where I am is where I need to be. Whether it was receiving a scholarship, doing well on an assignment in my major, or even just having a good conversation with someone, it all seemed to say that I was in the right place.
Now that my freshman year of college is coming to a close, I do believe that I am in the right place. Everything has come together within the last few weeks of this semester, and I can finally say that I am content with where I am. Now, when I say that everything came together, things did not effortlessly fall into place over the course of the year; rather, it took me taking a flying leap of faith off a cliff and rolling downhill for a while until I finally found a place to rest (by no means as graceful as merely "falling" into place!). But nonetheless, I feel better about where I am, and I am actually excited for what is to come in the next three years of my time here. I feel like I am on my way, and there is no better feeling than that.
Thanks for following me on my journey thus far. I hope you will continue to stick with me! -That Honest University Girl
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