The mental strength it takes to be living the "best years of our lives".

As the school year started to approach I began to get nervous again.

As a second year here at the University of Guelph, I can say without a doubt. I feel 100% more confident than the year previous. I think anyone can say that about their first year. As a first-year student, you’re nervous whether you admit it or not. Who wouldn’t be a little nervous, the transition from high school to university is big. From possibly moving out of your home, or away from family, doing lectures, and more difficult work. To even be in an environment where you know nobody, and let’s just say this out loud- socializing, coming out of the years 2020-2021 can still be hard for a lot of us.

As a first year, I started the year off thinking I was doing everything right, I had signed up for a club (which was JAYUxGuelph) before O-Week had even started, and I was prepared to have a roommate who would do orientation week with me, and I would go home at least two weeks after moving in, I had five notebooks and all the right dorm room essentials. But, I hadn’t prepared for the four-hour-long move-in in the burning heat, the fact that I broke down in tears after my parents left, my roommate wasn’t there, and I ate dinner alone. It was just my first day on campus and I had already felt like I’d failed. 

Now, this is not meant to scare any new first-year students (I promise), the thing I had not learned until the end of the year is that anything that happened that year that I felt “went wrong” didn’t; it was okay even if it didn’t meet my expectations.

Did you know that Jack.org's Youth Voice Report 2020 stated that; “94% of post-secondary survey respondents reported that academic stress creates mental health struggles for them and for their peers.”

Going into University there is this pressure of doing everything right. Make friends that’ll last a lifetime, you’re in a program for something you’ll do for your whole life because university is expensive. If you can do work, high school classes, homework, 2 school clubs, and an extracurricular outside of school and volunteering on top of that in 11th grade. How can you not do that in university?!? The truth is you can if you want to. But, most of us do not have the mental strength for it anymore, all of the high school pressure was to get into a university. 

Sure you can try to do it all,  if you are making it work in the first year, good for you and if you're not genuinely that is okay too. University can be difficult, and that is just the classes on their own. I just want to remind anyone in their first year or fifth year, It is okay if you do not have it all figured out. If we all were, to be honest with one another, none of us have everything figured out even if it seems like it. Life is all about trial and error, so use university as a chance to take that one class you always wanted to take even though it has nothing to do with your major. Go to meetings in every club on campus until one feels right. Get invited to go out with people you met 5 minutes earlier that day, do it who knows you might make a friend or it might just be a good time.

As I was struggling through my first year somebody gave me this amazing advice, that I hope will help you too: “Do everything you can, because even in university/college it is not always the degree that gets you to the future you are meant to have. But, it is the EXPERIENCES you have and the PEOPLE you meet”.

I guarantee most of us were told before we came to post-secondary school that it is going to be the “best years of our lives” and I don’t know about you but, the people that said that to me were trying to make me excited to come to school. But, it ended up being the biggest stressor in my life. The mental struggle of always trying to make my experience perfect, because to me the beginning of university did not feel like, “the best time of my life”.

These are the “best times of our lives” but, it doesn’t have to happen in a day, even a year or two. So, as we continue this coming school year 2022-2023. Take it easy, take a breath and just live your life to the best of your ability. It’ll all be okay in the end.