Oh, the holidays. The smell of crisp gingerbread or fresh latkes wafting throughout the house. Cheerful music echoing in every corridor. Family gathered by the fireplace reminiscing about the old days.

Ah so now it’s really the holidays. Our picturesque depiction of the holiday season interrupted by the question that seems to permeate the glorified month of December. What are the holidays without family gatherings where it feels as though each relative has lined up to ask you the exact same question?

So then why, when you know that you will inevitably have to answer too many broad questions about your life for the last four months, do you find yourself like a deer in headlights the minute this innocent question of liking school is broached. Chances are you instinctively respond with the classic “it’s good,” bypassing all rules of proper English grammar in order to strategically give yourself a buffer moment to figure out how best to respond. At this point, your mind frantically races trying to determine how much to reveal, how honest you want to be, and what wholesome experience to share in order to appease the gathering crowd. But maybe some of your mind hangs back in this wild goose chase and begins to reflect truthfully on the months prior. In college, we rarely allow ourselves a moment to breathe and reflect, so sometimes it takes a scenario like this to prompt us to do so. And in that brief moment of lucidity, you realize that maybe the past months haven’t been absolutely perfect and wholesome, but you’re already too deep in to go back. So instead of an honest answer, you pull yourself together and tell some sort of anecdote that leaves everyone laughing and satisfied enough to go back to their small talk.

If I took anything away from December 2018, it was how to deliver a fire anecdote that was full of shit. But let me back track a bit and tell you how I got there.

If we devise a spectrum with academic prowess on the left and social aptitude on the right, in high school I would have likely found myself left of center. My priorities were a clear hierarchy with academics first, relationships second. I would have never dreamed of wasting time kissing up to the most popular girls or trying to impress boys. As such, I passed through most of high school oblivious to the intricate system of social contracts and formalities buzzing around me. I was impervious to distractions. That was until I became a second semester senior and within a matter of weeks I had started dating someone, my grades had declined, and my parents undoubtedly had an aneurysm. So if that was second semester, college was going to be a whole new ball game.

In fact, coming to college felt like walking into the Garden of Eden where distractions could be picked like apples off every nearby tree. Though in high school I was content living in my own world, in college I wanted to experience everything. But freshman year, as amazing as it is, is fucking terrifying. Hundreds of new people to meet, an infinite number of new social spheres to navigate, it can be rather overwhelming if not properly handled. And I obviously did not handle it properly. Rather than let myself be overcome by the nerves and anxiety I was feeling, I pushed forward, using them as motivation to immerse myself even more in the buzzing social scene. In his new novel, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman discusses how, “Cognitive, emotional, and physical effort draw a least partly on a shared pool of mental energy.” That is to say that since I was overexerting myself socially, I was channeling far less effort into my academics. To put it this way, I went out the night before my Econ 201 midterm rather than study or get a decent night of sleep. But I will let the 3.0 GPA I left first semester with speak for itself. Needless to say, balance was not a word I had familiarized myself with.

“How are you liking college?” “It’s good.” In no world was I about to tell my 95-year-old grandparents that college hadn’t been super easy or that I hadn’t aced all my classes. But truthfully, first semester freshman year was not a breeze. Yes, it was a whirlwind of fun and excitement. But it was also stressful, nerve-wracking, and exhausting. Hours after I left the holiday party, I sat there questioning how I had managed to royally fail the one part of college I thought I had under my belt. And moreover, I began to wonder how I had gone from a care-free, easy-going person who wasn’t bothered by any types of social nuances to this suppressed conglomerate of anxiety that had spent months inside a pressure cooker and was going to explode at any moment.

But let’s fast forward a bit. After spending much of winter break self-reflecting, I approached second semester with a solid game plan.  – and after frequently finding myself the last one in the Gothic Reading Room, my academics finally improved. But unfortunately, even though I thought I had straightened out my priorities, my social anxiety didn’t dissipate. That little pit you sometimes feel at the bottom of your stomach, that nags at your mind and seems to always play devil’s advocate, had become an old acquaintance. By the time the end of the year came around, I felt as though the energy reserves I previously mentioned had run dry and all forms of social interaction left me drained. While saying my goodbyes at Beach Week and realizing how much I would genuinely miss my friends, something in the back of my head was telling me that coming home for the summer was a blessing in disguise – a moment to breathe and recalibrate once again.

So this was my freshman year in all its glory. And if I asked myself how I was liking college, I probably wouldn’t respond it’s good because, honestly, freshman year is not always smooth sailing. For some, freshman year is a place where you flourished intellectually – maybe maintaining the coveted 4.0 or joining an elite pre-professional club. For others, freshman year was a time where you thrived socially – becoming friends with everyone or finding yourself at the top of the social stratosphere. But statistically speaking, most of you probably had a freshman year filled with peaks and valleys. For me, the freedom of college felt both like taking a desperately needed breath of fresh air while simultaneously being drowned in a pool of water. I had access to an infinite number of new opportunities, but I think the infinite opportunities were a few too many for me to handle.

Reflecting on my own turbulent freshman year, I have learned about the importance of finding a balance in life, regardless of how unevenly tipped the scales may appear to be. If you were to aggregate my freshman year, it would come out about average: a 3.0 and 3.8 would land me around a 3.4 GPA and I would have some hybrid social life. Nevertheless, surface level averages don’t imply balance. True balance can be achieved only when priorities and values are concretely declared and diligently adhered to. However, most people forget that balance can only even be achieved if you are in the right mindset to recognize its significance. I urge you to remember that you are always allowed to step back and re-evaluate. No coach would ever send their team into the fray without a game plan. And similarly, no coach would give their team the play book and then leave the field for the game, expecting everything to go exactly by the book. In approaching a challenge like freshman year, it is of immense important that you give yourself a game plan, but also allow yourself the flexibility to take moments of recalibration and introspection if the game isn’t playing out as you expected.

By Isabel Friedman
Duke student, not much of a cheeky tagline person