my college life - experiences as a young adult

it's never too late to make yourself happy

for a long time i was unhappy. it's not some groundbreaking revelation. i see the content i've posted on wattpad since i was 13. i was an unhappy person. i still am, sometimes.

much of this unhappiness came from the fact i was doing things to impress other people, constantly. i failed to think about what i wanted.

college is great in a lot of ways. a huge upside to it is that you're able to make mistakes and think about what you want for your life.

i have made mistakes in college. i've hurt people, and i've gotten hurt myself. i've made decisions that have hurt me.

my most painful and regrettable decision was choosing to switch out of a major that was my lifelong dream- astrophysics, into a simpler choice, political science.

my entire life i seldom felt enough. i felt like i was a fraud who had convinced everyone i was intelligent, and that if i tried any harder soon people would figure out i'm not as smart as they thought.

it hurt more to think that i could try my best and still fail than to give up before i even bothered trying.

looking back, clearly it was the wrong decision. i wish i could have told myself i was smart enough. but we can't turn back time. another huge part of this was the toxic relationship i was in freshman year of college- but that's for another day. if i feel like it.

this story does in fact have a happy ending, though. after 2 years of misery in political science, a major that was often mind numbing with students who were pretentious and painfully hopeless about the world, i made the difficult but fulfilling choice that i would give astrophysics one last chance.

everyday i woke up with doubts about myself, about failure and how everyone would soon find out i was a fraud who had convinced them all i was intelligent when i wasn't.

but i guess when you decide to give those doubts room to exist without acting on them, and persevering regardless, you start proving them wrong.

i'm proud of myself now, for making the difficult decision to go back. i'm going to have to stay at college another year to finish my major credits. but it's worth it to me.

i'm presenting research on mars at a conference in the next month, and the day after i'm flying out to arizona to look through telescopes for one of my observational astronomy courses. i'm in a research group at my college that studies and maps out the galaxy through the leftover matter of dead stars.

it's strange, because for years this was all i wanted. if anything- it's more than what i wanted, my pre-college brain could never wrap my head around a lot of my life now. i never expected any of this. maybe that's why it feels so good.

i wasn't happy before but i'm happy now. it's never too late to make yourself happy, even if it is the more difficult choice.