The tragedy of being human, I think, is that we are rarely satisfied with our own choices, no matter how carefully we make them.
When I started college, I had imagined a very different life for myself. Like many others, I was not entirely content with the college I chose. I dreamed of studying far away from home, enrolling in a big professional course, and stepping into what the world romanticises as our young, independent years. Years of exploration, ambition, and becoming.
The first year are a kind of gentle illusion. You tell yourself it is not as bad as you feared. There is excitement in new beginnings, expectations of making friends, meeting unfamiliar people, and having long conversations that make you feel seen. The early weeks are spent exploring campuses and personalities, trying to locate yourself within this new world.
Then reality arrives, quietly at first, and then all at once. Academic pressure creeps in through exams and deadlines. People are not always what you expect them to be. At the same time, you are still trying to redefine yourself in a place you have not fully accepted. Before this adjustment settles, the second year begins.
The second year feels heavier in ways no one prepares you for. The novelty has worn out, but belonging has not arrived.
You are no longer new, yet you do not feel settled. Friendships thin out, conversations grow surface-level, and you find yourself eating alone more often than you imagined you would.
By the second year, many of us have very few close friends on campus. We are unsure of what we want from life. We begin comparing ourselves to strangers in corridors or people we scroll past on Instagram, those who seem more confident, more accomplished, more certain. The loneliness feels sharper when it is attached to a place you once had high expectations of.
Each small setback begins to feel personal. Each unfulfilled expectation feels like failure. You are not just disappointed by college as it is, but by the version of it you once carried so carefully in your mind.
There is a quiet loneliness in realising that this disappointment is not dramatic enough to speak about, yet heavy enough to sit with you every day. You feel disconnected, stuck between past expectations and an uncertain future, unsure of where to place this feeling without sounding ungrateful or dramatic.
What often goes unspoken is how common this experience actually is. So many students carry the same quiet sadness, believing they are alone in it because everyone else appears to be moving forward effortlessly.
Perhaps the most important thing the second year teaches us is endurance. It teaches us how to sit with discomfort, how to keep going after small disappointments, and how to show up for ourselves when no one else is watching.
Progress does not always look like achievement. Sometimes, it looks like simply staying. I am still learning to discover myself in layers in this place. I have found a quiet peace in empty corridors, silent libraries, and among familiar faces that ask nothing of me.
Every moment here shapes you into something more human, often without your noticing. The only thing you must learn is where to anchor yourself, so you do not sink. That anchorage has to be your self-belief, your ambitions, and the future you are slowly learning to imagine.
In your twenties, dissatisfaction with past endings and hope for future beginnings can coexist. This in-between space of failing and figuring out is not a detour from growth. It is the growth.
The second year is lonely, yes. But it is also quietly shaping us into versions of ourselves we may not recognise yet, but are slowly becoming.