Five Things for an Extroverted-Introvert to Enjoy Before College.

I’ve had a lot of changes happen in my life. I’ve changed a lot as a person in my life. This blog is a testament to that, and it’s one of the things I love about it.  All that is to say, once again my life has gotten crazy. It’s probably been one of the biggest change in my life, and it as a result has changed everything involved in my life. I have officially moved in to a college campus and am attending the University.

I know. College, woo, it’s the best four years of your life, enjoy it while it lasts. The college experience. Take advantage of it, learn how to live, meet people, party until the break of dawn everyday of your life. That’s great and all, and maybe some of that is true. However, for an Extroverted-Introverted/over-thinker/anxiety ridden individual such as myself, people often leave out the stress that also comes from college. When you’re first going to college, you’re stressed from the fact that you literally know none of the people around you. So, you’re forced to make friends, and the way you are going to go about that is quite the burden to think about, at least if you have to think about every little aspect like I do. Not to mention, you have classes, a job usually, you have to pick and decide a major that you may or may not stick with, but will determine the amount of money you end up either borrowing or somehow obtaining, and will certainly determine how the rest of your life turns out. So. You know, no pressure. Just enjoy the best four years of your life partying and having no responsibilities or worries. Because that’s possible in such an environment. Anyways, I’m here to write about several things that I find myself missing already, only a week into this whole college life, and living on campus thing. I’d like to preface this with the fact I’ve had very little experience here so far, and my “dorm” is a hotel room. All this is to say that I’m speaking only from my experiences and from what I’ve seen. Take a note that this is coming from an extroverted introvert’s perspective. In other words, this is my opinion, and it’s not from anyone else’s experience at college.

1.) Enjoy living with your parents and/or siblings.

“But Josiah,” You say to me, “You don’t understand my parents and/or siblings. They’re horrible, messy, and tease me all the time.” You might be right. They might be all those things. But. They’re familiar. You, in some form or other, trust them. You’ve lived with them your whole life, so you understand how they function. You get them. You know what they love, what they hate. How to get on their nerves, how to avoid punishment, how to hide from them, and you can always find one way or another to be away from them and be alone. (Trust me, for an introvert/ambivert, this was incredibly essential.) When it was first revealed to me that I was going to get a roommate, I was actually pretty excited at first. I thought it’d be great. All the sitcoms I’ve seen flashed through my mind, and I thought that it’d be awesome to get to know someone so well and become best friends with them. Sure, that might be true in the television shows, but when you’re given a complete stranger, the chances your personalities are going to mesh well is close to one in a million. Even if you love your roommate, for quite some time it simply isn’t the same. You just can’t be as comfortable around them as you could your family. Not to mention, nothing about them is familiar. You have to relearn how to live and interact with someone. The tedious amount of energy and thought that requires is something that slowly becomes a burden. It makes you appreciate the times when you simply KNEW the person/people you were living with and could be 100% yourself. My advice for anyone struggling with this is to communicate with your roommate and be one hundred percent yourself. I’ve learned already that despite wanting to appear cool or like somebody I’m not so they might enjoy being around me, I realized rather quickly that was pretty much idiotic. THEY LIVE WITH ME NOW. Of course they’ll have to see the real me. At one point or another. So save yourself a ton of trouble and try not to impress them or be somebody you’re not. Also, communicate with them about pretty much everything, because you will disagree with them about something, and if neither of you say anything, then it’ll just rage deep inside until one of you bursts. That would not be pretty, let me tell you.

2.) Enjoy the friends you grew up with.

The friends in your hometown are people that know everything about you. My three best friends in the entire world have known me since sixth grade, and they know pretty much every tiny little thing about me. This ISN’T a bad thing. It means they know me just as well, if not better, than I know myself. They know your parents, your family, what you did in high school, they know your potential, your mistakes and problems, and love you anyways. Going to college, it’s essentially starting all over. Nothing from your past really matters. Nobody knows what you did in high school. Very few people see your potential. Nobody knows the tiny things you love, or the weird little things that you do. You’re completely unknown. It’s so easy, comfortable, and relaxing to be with your friends who understand how you function. They know that sometimes you need to be away from everything, and that you love spontaneous hangouts at Taco Bell. Or that you need adventures into the woods in your life, or that you need to hangout with them and do absolutely nothing besides just being with them. You can hangout with them whenever and wherever without ever worrying about them judging you or not understanding why you do the things you do. For me, the amount of pressure I feel trying to get other people to understand this without taking four years of my life is terrifying, exhausting, incredibly uncomfortable and a bit depressing. As someone who might as well have an anxiety disorder, the amount of worries that go through my head every time I try to make new friends is slightly miserable. I’ve personally found that my friends from my hometown are incredibly special and unique. I honestly don’t think I’ll ever find people quite like them anywhere else. So, enjoy the time you have with them while you can.

3.) Enjoy not having to pay for classes or housing or pretty much anything.

You know that ATM machine you call your parents? Yeah. They won’t always be there. Pretty self-explanatory. I’d also encourage you to save up if you have a job. This can’t be overstated, and is incredibly important. And for those seniors, find scholarships, as many as possible. They’ll get you places.

4.) Enjoy your hometown and discover it fully.

Moving to a new place is exciting and wonderful. Everything is new and fresh and there’s so much to see that you haven’t seen before. I love being new places and seeing new things. But let me tell you. When you first get to a new city, new place, a new home, everything feels slightly foreign to you. You have to rediscover everything. Which is exciting and wonderful, but it requires effort and can be a bit daunting. Your hometown, by the time you leave, if you’ve lived there your whole life like I did, is fully uncovered. If it hasn’t been completely discovered and uncovered, I HIGHLY encourage you to do so. Find every nook and cranny that might have some possibility of being interesting. I highly encourage you to make sure there’s not a single spot undiscovered in your hometown before you leave. There’s something amazing about knowing what’s around every corner and down every street. You know all the secret spots that no one else knows. Places that no one else would even think about visiting, but mean the world to you. There’s also the small shops and family owned businesses that only natives from your area know of. These places are special, and just aren’t the same if you didn’t grow up there. Make memories in these places. Find someplace completely isolated but comfortable. Where you can just be you with your thoughts. I can list at least three of these places that I found in my hometown. Every time I go back, I’m going to want to visit them. In a new town, these secret places are lost and deeply hidden behind the buildings, signs, and lights. It’s hard to find the secret spots when you have no idea where to start.

5.) Enjoy being a kid.

College is a kicker right in the adulthood pants. In other words, it’s really hard to do all the things you could do as a kid when you’re in college. Between classes, a job, getting time and money for food and cleaning up after yourself, it becomes significantly harder to find time to wander around outside. The free time you have as a kid, (yes that includes high-schoolers, don’t be so anxious to be old you whipper-snappers.) just doesn’t exist when you get into college. You find yourself getting stacked with paperwork, homework, and decisions. So please, please, take advantage of your time as a kid with few responsibilities and worries. Obviously, this changes from person to person, but overall, the amount of responsibilities are significantly less. So get together with your friends and learn their ins and outs. Go explore your town, just go walk in a random direction and find a special spot. Goof off and mess around with your friends. Enjoy life some. Don’t be stupid, be considerate of others in all things, but don’t try to have a mask over your life all of you adolescence. It’s miserable. Mess with people when it’s harmless, and help them realize that they need to relax and enjoy life a little bit too. If you’re uncomfortable with something, or hate doing something, but everyone else is doing it and so you feel obligated to do it even though you know it’s a bad for you, or bad for other people, DON’T DO IT. Explain yourself, and just walk away. Don’t worry about trying to be “the popular kid”. Just be the kid who loves life and people. Simple as that.

 

That was a lot to read, so congratulations. I hope you learned something, maybe about yourself, maybe about, or at least about me. Take all of this with a grain of salt, but make the most of the time given to you. All that being said, I’m going to try and find some quiet, lovely introvert spots around my new town.

 

Starting a new Chapter,

Josiah Serravalle.

Striving for Hope

As I start this post, I realize that this topic is going to be more emotional for me than my other ones have been. Or so it seems. So it might not make a whole lot of sense, but here it is anyways. Bare with me here. Partially because hope is something of my main painful traits and yet positive quality. Anyways, might as well jump right into it.

I find it extremely important that as you grow up and mature, an important part of this is figuring out who you are. I don’t mean asking people who you are, or what you’re good at, I mean you looking yourself in the eyes and being able to tell yourself what kind of person you are. Describe to yourself your flaws, your character, your qualities. The things you struggle with and things that you achieve and succeed at. It takes a lot of maturity to be able to confront yourself with all your failures and successes. And just as much maturity to realize who you are. Since I’m constantly trying to become as mature as possible, I try to challenge myself by attempting this. And I don’t always succeed, occasionally I even forget who I am. I get lost. It sounds silly to forget who you are, but it’s so simple and easy to fall into without realizing it. That however, is an entirely different discussion I’ll get into some other time.

I’d also like to note that when I say maturity, I’m not referring to being a lame adult who can’t have fun and always works. I’m referring to the maturity that is becoming a man or woman, accepting responsibilities, and being able to accept your own actions and take the consequences without excuses. Integrity. Good character, the list goes on. Anyways, back to my main point.

In the process of doing this, and through some experiences that I’ve recently gone through and their challenges, I’ve realized that I’m an extremely hopeful person. This is a good thing, and not necessarily a bad thing, however it can be a painful thing. It means that as things happen in life, even in the worst circumstances, I somehow manage to find hope that things are going to get better. Life will move on. Things will progress. And when something is uncertain, I always try to see the best outcome.

So, let me define Hope real quick, completely, from a dictionary.

“Hope – A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.”

A desire for a certain thing to happen. And assuming we want the best outcome, (even if it is only the best in our eyes, and not truly the best), it’s then a desire for the best thing to happen. We have a phrase for that, one that is pretty much my life. “Well, just gotta hope for the best.” And that’s what I do. You’ll probably hear me say something similar to this a lot if you bring a problem up to me. “Do as much as you can, glorify God, try with all your heart, do your best, then hope for the best.” That has sort of become the motto of my life. No matter how bad things get, and though I almost always think of the worst things that could happen, or how awful something just was, I stop and give myself some time to collect myself, and then tell myself this same phrase. Usually just something similar, not identical to this.  This especially applies when I’m looking forward to something, for example, when getting ready for an AP test. Then I prepare myself, and just let whatever happens, happen. It helps to get me through situations. Afterwords, I go through the things I don’t regret, the things I do, and the good things along with the bad. I re-analyze the situation, paying special attention to things that made it worth it. And because of that, I feel less regret, because I realize whatever it was, it was worth it. Even if things ended horribly, the experience built you. The decisions you made might have been terrible, but because of them you can learn more. I’m not saying do whatever you want, because the experience will shape you and everything is worth it. The consequences can be and are dire, and some things genuinely aren’t worth it, and can ruin your life. These things don’t come without their awful experiences and traumas. You were made for so much more than momentary things and experiences. So don’t make terrible decisions, you’re life doesn’t have to be terrible. Since I tend to make big deals out of small things, I’m especially referring to little things you go through like taking a certain class that you hated but got stuck in. And so that part of this is a good thing.

However, this is also where it becomes a sort of flaw. I say flaw, but I’m not entirely sure one can call it that. Going into a situation, I always instantly see the worst that can happen, but deep inside me, I instantly find hope in it, and latch onto what good might come from it. When things seem hopeless, or are hopeless, I find a sort of hope to keep me from gnawing away at myself. I keep thinking of how things aren’t going to end poorly, and find myself thinking that just maybe something will work out. And so I constantly find myself getting my hopes up for nothing. And it’s the most crushing feeling one can experience. But since it’s a part of me, I just constantly return to that hope. I understand that a majority of people after enough times, simply shut down to hope. And as I reflect on moments in my past, I realize that I used to have more hope before than even now. But as it got crushed, I began to slowly back away from hoping, and removing those thoughts of hope when they try to arise. There’s no way that could happen. I find myself thinking that those positive things are hopeless and pointless, and there’s no reason to hold on to them, because it’s just going to hurt when they fail. Still, at the same time, not hoping can hurt just as much. Without hope, things seem pointless. Without hope, things seem worthless, and all seems lost. Reasons for things get thrown out. And so when I fail to hope, rather than just having a chance of getting hurt and failing, you are guaranteed failure. Sure, some things might surprise you, but the feeling doesn’t pass. Hopelessness latches on. There have been times in my life when I’ve felt hopelessness to it’s fullest. I felt more lost and depressed in those moments than any time my hopes have been let down. So when I re-analyze these moments like I do most of my experiences, and weigh out the different aspects of it, I find hope to be worth it. Hope is worth it. So strive for hope. In fact, though things in this life will destroy our hope, when we put our hope in God, we put it in the one thing that won’t let us be put to shame. As Psalms 25:3 says,

“No one who hopes in you
    will ever be put to shame,
but shame will come on those
    who are treacherous without cause.”

Naturally, I had to end it on a positive note as I somehow managed to string together my thoughts.

Striving for Hope,

Josiah Serravalle