Opinion: “Freshers: The Pressures”
Mid-October, I was sat on the 5:17 bus home from Maynooth. As a first-year, certain thoughts loomed from the back of my mind. Was I meant to break out from stress? I wondered when I would finally begin to be at home here. My head hung low, and I could feel the layer of makeup plastered on my face lying heavy. The leaves were starting to change, but I felt unmoved by it all.
The fact that I hadn’t really met anyone made me feel a crushing pressure behind the phrase, “These are the best years of your life.” Right. Each day I spent sitting alone in a lecture hall stung a little more. In secondary school, I had envisioned myself walking through the gates of university and into a life of parties, clubs, and friendships more nuanced than the ones back home.
I began to think about how I enjoy scrapbooking memories. Sticking photos onto a page as if to say, “I did it! I made the most of myself! I am achieved.” That thought inspired me to contemplate how we chase certain ideas of success so young, in the ways we value relationships, and especially in new environments where we're still unsure of themselves.
A tendency I see slowly consuming both myself and other young people is the habit of treating lived experiences as bookmarks for progression. We objectify our experiences to measure success by how much we possess. Little by little, we start reflecting on them in terms of numbers. How many friends we have, how many things we do, whether we work impressive jobs or land great opportunities. We keep score in every corner of life, and in doing so, claim a strange ownership over what we believe we possess. You begin to evaluate yourself through what you think you possess by saying things like: “I’m not falling behind! I have a boyfriend and a good job.”
These markers make me reliant on what society deems important as the basis for evaluating my own existence. I seek permission to be happy by asking, “Is it enough?” And so, we bookmark our successes, scrapbooking whatever feels important in the moment.
But what's the harm in placing all your photos down, and measuring with a ruler how successful life has been? The pages of life can only carry what you make of it. Blank chapters feel intimidating at first, but you slowly take hold of a vision. We don't often realise our blessings until a friend makes us cry with laughter, or you find yourself waking up with some newfound energy. That's why it's important to put down the ruler. Your friends are much more than something in life that you can or should quantify.
Sometimes, we live in a scarcity mindset. I noticed during Freshers Week people clung to others in fear they wouldn’t meet anyone else. When we feel we are scarce of relationships, we often accept the closest thing, regardless of whether it’s of any considerable quality. Hence the importance of not counting these things. Friendships begin to blossom out of little undiscovered corners, from small conversations or little jokes made in lectures. There’s an abundance of growing opportunity.
When we begin to value ourselves in ways that are more attentive to how we function, such as health or self-expression, we start to lose our egos need for ownership over our friends, jobs, or circumstances. We simply exist without expectations. We don’t expect friends to act a certain way, and we can begin to open our eyes to how wonderful they actually act. Same with uni or work. You should be proud of achieving these things, sure, but have you considered that certain things are never promised? Do not expect that when you enter university there won’t be challenges ahead. You can almost burn yourself out with expectations.
There is, of course, some logic to this approach in self-evaluation. I often find myself with one red eye open and the other covered by my pillow, my phone’s brightness turned down in bed at some late hour which I wasted not sleeping, scrolling through the stories on Instagram or Snapchat of the girls I once knew having the absolute time of their lives. Some left Ireland, others found their perfect little student accommodation and their great new friends. It filled me with a little bit of dread. Everything is changing now. But then I might think to myself about how I compare to that one snapshot of their life. Its one of those things that predisposes me to our need to fit in. The ways in which we measure our approachability is through a lens of success. “They’re too cool for me.” It’s only natural, then, we chase having a life that gives us a level of success so that we may be the one that others are envious of for a change.
In doing this, we trophy-place attributes and don’t give ourselves much room to experiment with how we view ourselves. I want you to think about your own personal scrapbook, all the people and memories glued between the pages. I bet you almost forgot all the negatives from that time. I bet you skipped past the fact you felt ugly in that shirt and focused on your friend smiling ear to ear beside you. What would you do to relive that slight moment of happiness? To see your friends back in that group you spent your summers with. My point is, the nature of life is incredibly intimate. Things like opportunities die, only to be reborn as something else. Like energy, everything continues. To trophy place something that only belongs to time chains you to a life of constant chasing. Perhaps contentment all there is now. Maybe that’s as far as any of us will ever get to it.