Today: Mar 28, 2024

College life versus home life

Wula ChamCopyEditor

Going home is a process.  

I do not know if you have recently gone home but going home for the weekend, as a college student, is a lot of work. You just don’t decide to go home and then be done with it. There is a lot of calculation that comes along with the act, and if you are like me, you plan everything ahead of time, so everything goes smoothly.  

I cannot imagine going home every weekend. I will literally succumb to moody days and dark nights. I am unaware of how some people do it. The flow in college and the flow at home is very different and the switch in between throws me off very easily. In my perspective, when you are on campus, you are in a fast-paced environment and is forced to catch up or speed up, so you don’t get left behind, while at home, everything goes so slow and there is a “chill” vibe all over the place, reminding you to relax, take it slow and enjoy the moment. I feel like I get stuck in this ‘’chill” zone because I always tend to stray away from work whenever I am home.

Normally, when I plan to go home or when my parents want me home for the weekend, I try to do almost all my assignments before Friday comes. I do not know what it is about my house, but whenever I go home or step one foot inside that building, I become inadequate to do any assignment or work related to school. I get distracted so easily and cannot seem to do anything I had planned on doing when I get home.  

I just went home this weekend and I had planned to do a small portion of my assignments on each day I was home, but needless to say, it did not work out as planned, and I ended up slacking off more than I should. 

There are just so many distractions at home that I have no resistance against. My worst distraction is my younger brother, who always gets overly energetic whenever he sees me and wants to do literally everything together. I completely understand that he misses me and wants to spend the most time with me before I get on my way back to campus, but I wish he understands that I have other responsibilities that need to be taken care of. He always wants to either watch a movie, a show, or go out to get some Chick-fil-a so he can get the chicken sandwich and pretend like he has never tasted or eaten chicken in his entire life.  

My second worst distraction is my mother. My mother always tends to cook for me whenever I go home and I love her for that, but instead of doing what I came to do or am supposed to be doing, I always end up helping her out with cooking, going shopping for her, or listening to her rants as she listens to me in return. There is no way I can pass on the invitation of listening to my mother rant about her week or month. Her rants are always enjoyable to me, although frustrating to her it may seem. As much as I try to relate to her side and understand where she is coming from, the way she tells the story just makes me laugh. She comes out so unknowingly funny that I can’t help to be thankful for her. We may disagree sometimes, but that woman loves me more than anyone in the world. 

Although my family sometimes serves as a distraction, unintentionally, I am grateful for them as they help me forget about the stress that comes with college and all the assignments and projects I have to get done before the semester comes to an end. They serve as a reminder for me to take things slow and relax. This is exactly what I do whenever I am with them, maybe excessively, but who cares right, as I always say: as long as I am happy, nothing can go wrong. 

With staying on campus, I am constantly surrounded with school, work, school, work, more work, more school, and then a small dose of social entertainment. I do too much on campus and I do not know how I always manage to handle all of it. Unfortunately, now and then, I would forget to take time for myself to relax and this obviously would later come back to haunt me but with stress. So, going home cools me up and kind of gives me a wake-up call that my health is more important and should always come first. For any student out there going through a stressful situation, take a step back from the situation, analyze it, ask for help even if you do not need it, and tackle the situation in the best way possible. Sometimes the counterattack doesn’t work, and it is okay to step back again and re-think another plan.  

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