By Anna Synakh || Managing Editor
Dear Freshman and Sophomore Classes,
I am jealous. I am so deeply jealous of your current positions on campus. Yes, you are missing out on numerous opportunities, experiences, and connections on campus. Yes, you are currently struggling, living at home with your parents’ constant nagging, door knocks, and random room busts. Yes, you don’t really know what the point of paying for F&M is when you can’t fully experience it. But, there is one gigantic plus to your remoteness:
Never feeling the pain of becoming close friends with those older than you and seeing them get their lives together right before your eyes, only to leave you behind in tears.
My freshman year, I became friends with about ten sophomores, who I could rely on with everything that came my way, in front of whom I even occasionally cried. Over the past three years, these sophomores became my closest friends and confidants; they were equally there for me when I was a five-minute walk away in a different college house and at a thousand miles distance when I was studying abroad. I thought they would never betray me, but now they are receiving admission letters, job offers, fellowships, etc. It was so thoughtless of them!
For the past month, I have had to congratulate the people I call friends while resenting them for figuring their lives out. How dare they move on! How dare they look for apartments in Philadelphia and not consider a two-bedroom apartment, so the second room is always readily available for me to move into or visit on the weekends! How dare they consider moving to Spain for a year on a fellowship! It’s as if we weren’t even friends after all.
So dear Freshman and Sophomore Classes, use this opportunity of being removed from most interactions you’d normally have on campus, to break all bonds you had possibly made with the Junior and Senior classes. Unadd them on Snapchat; unfollow them on Instagram; better yet, delete their phone numbers. In any way you can possibly prevent the pain that will come with saying goodbye, please do so. Preclude yourself from facing the inner struggle between being immensely proud of your friends, and wanting them to fail out of Module 4 so that they can stay with you for an extra year. Cut off all ties, so that you never have to face the inevitable: time flies, and it will keep flying by uncontrollably. It’s a horrifying thought and a nearly unacceptable realization, but it will hit you like a train when those around you begin entering a whole new world, which might not have space for you just yet.
If you have already made the mistake of connecting with the older generation the way I did, assure yourself that you have a few people your age that can support you throughout the withdrawal phase that inevitably will come knocking at your door in a few months. I was lucky enough to snag a couple my freshman year, so not all is lost for me. Now might be the time for you, however, to pop into one of those Zoom activities that the school organizes and make some bonds with people in your class, so that you are not all by your lonesome once the year comes to an end.
And to all my senior friends, I just want to say: it’s a tough and scary world out there, full of struggles, decisions, and hard choices. Are you sure you’re ready for that? Are you sure you want to make that commitment? Or maybe, just maybe, you want to hang around for another semester? or a year? Or perhaps never leave me at all?
Junior Anna Synakh is the Managing Editor. Her email is asynakh@fandm.edu.