I Really Just finished Undergrad: Year 1

 Soooo because I lied and never wrote on this blog I am going to do a four part series where I recap the last four years of college and what I went through. It’s not live so there’s no way to self reflect but life was juicy so it should be interesting especially when I get to the this year and you realize nothing about my life has changed since high school. 

And with That we’ll start with Freshman Year. 

I was tasked with the unfortunate fate of being apart of the graduating class of 2020. 2020 was a year of many things. Death, sickness, ignorance, anger, solitude, etc. The list goes on and on. I spent 2020 at home in the suburbs, home building my room in a rental (you’ll see how foolish that was later). When I got accepted to NYU, I had 5 friends at the time,  that I spoke to on a constant rotation. We had a FaceTime group chat that we watched movies in, talked until ungodly hours in the morning on, and basically supported each other through the pandemic with. It ended in a fiery argument of dick print pics and wrongful accusations, but at first we had a beautiful hub that felt like it would last forever. I got accepted off the waitlist, forfeited my $500 deposit to Loyola and God opened the golden road for me to attend my dream school with scholarships and money lined up in all the right places. I spent the summer taking pictures while stooped in body dysmorphia that has yet to go away and a trio friendship that seemed at its peak strength only for it to break like London Bridge months later. 

Taking classes on zoom worked for me, one because I have anxiety and it’s a hell of a lot easier to be on a screen with only your face in frame than to travel across the country to a school in city you only visited once. I really didn’t  want to leave my mommy. That’s the truth and so I was Uber glad to stay at home and twittle my thumbs in a pink bed room that I had decorated to the tee. Me and my karaoke machine that I used everytime I wanted to sing away the lonely and give my life pomp and circumstance ruled this era and when I crave that isolation and vocal release I deeply reminisce of that time when it was me, a mic, and an isolated space. 

Speaking of that isolated space; Depression was a live living demon in my room. Probably not the same one that pushed my head down forcefully into the bed while I was experiencing sleep paralysis but definitely the one that made me roll over every morning and say “I hate my life.” Despite my every attempt at pomp and circumstance, despite the dream school, I was going through it with my mind and body. My guts decided they weren’t going to process food anymore and no matter how many doctors I went to nobody could tell me whether I had an anal fissure or hemorrhoids but they kept telling me “you need to poop”. no shit I need to poop, but you try pooping while your ass hole feels like it’s slit up the side. The pain was excruciating and all the Eucalyptus aromatherapy candles in the world couldn’t ease that pain. 

And Hemorrhoids?!? I haven’t even had a baby yet, why the fuck would I want Hemorrhoids at 18. I was swallowing black seed oil which literally taste like turpentine, and Miralax, shit shit shit shit shit was my constant fucking reality and I’m so happy to say I can shit like a normal person now but damn those days were awful. I would get out of Greek History to take a shower, suffer a painful shit, take two advil, work out and then try taking another painful shit. Needless to say toilets were overflowed, and so many unmentionable things happened. If I die from colon cancer, that would be the most predicable thing the universe ever did. Anyways pass the shit, I spent a lot of time reading. After I had the biggest mental break of my life (there’s a mental institution inducing  video out there), I spent the entire day in my room and cried until my face hurt and then I did the most reasonable thing a depressed person can do besides kill themselves and I went looking for a romance book because the root of all depression is poverty and loneliness. The perfect combination of Xscapes Who Can I Run To and From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L Armatout lifted the veil of depression so quickly I self diagnosed a new disorder. Bipolar Disorder. It was so quick. One minute I was crying and Poppy was trapped in her misogynistic horror of a life and the next minute I was giddier than a four year old at Christmas and Poppy was trapped underneath CAs getting her n- and I’ll leave it at that because I have class. (But mostly because I reallly hit the crass quota with the shit talk)

Anyways I got in my book bag freshman year. Between the Greek Mythology and the Writing classes, and my depressive episode I spent that entire year with my nose in books. Hit Different by Sza was my morning alarm clock for my 7am Korean Class and Can’t Stop me by Twice was my evening alarm for my Greek History blog post. I spent lazy afternoons in Bilingualism learning about early second language  acquisition and questioning whether I was an actually going to be a translator. (Spoiler: that is not what I majored in)

I got a new bed, discovered that I have a lowkey budding passion for screenwriting or directing, ditched that passion as soon as I found out how hard it is to take Tisch classes and then started rewriting my Wattpad stories. Mafia Principessa is my greatest moment from that era although I still haven’t finished it. 

That’s Spring I went to California for the first time, full of shit and feeling like the biggest bitch on the planet. But first let me say this. I’m not fat phobic. I have my own body standards and this is how I felt. Whether o was socialized to feel that way or not, I felt like the biggest bitch ever, me my body, and I could give a shit less about anybody else’s. My relationship with weight does not own me anybody but me an explanation or understanding, so get your panties in a twist elsewhere.  Anyways my stomach was literally eternally on five months pregnant because I couldn’t shit and I didn’t bring preparation h so I could. Your thinking, “You didn’t shit for 5 day” it was that bad. A week sometimes. Yup a whole 7 days. And I thought my period away so I wouldn’t bleed the entire time. Which was really hard to do because the minute I was ready to cry it could have been all over and I wanted to cry so many times. The thing I learned the most from that trip is the people you travel with make the trip so don’t travel with strangers you don’t know if you have to spend the entire trip around them, and don’t travel with people who you low-key think are insufferable because you will feel isolated alone and crazy. I lowkey endorse solo travel but I think trio’s are great. Gotta beat the Taken 2. 

After California I came back and can’t quite remember the following summer off the top of my head lowkey. I think we got kicked out of the rental and had to move with 30 days notice moved in with my grandparents and slept on their couch which was really a page out of the book of hell. The emotional trauma I feel from living having lived with them is cray. Luckily I was only there for a couple months and then moved into my dorm which started the year of hell. 2021.