When you apply to college, you spend a lot of time preparing yourself - for the drain of writing a million essays, for the toll of crushing disappointment, for (hopefully) the best news you could imagine receiving. You prepare yourself for the idea that, even after all of that, your dream college might not be an option. You do your best to prepare yourself for every scenario because so much of the process is completely up in the air. I spent months in a state of constant preparation. When you've sent off your applications, there's not much else you can do.
But what I was absolutely not prepared for were the Facebook groups. Each time you're accepted to a college, you're added to a new Facebook group. Every school has one, whether it's run by the school itself or merely created by overexcited students. These pages exist so that accepted students can post looking for roommates and potential friends and get a head start on socializing before they arrive at school. These Facebook pages are a nightmare. Everyone makes posts presenting the best, most relatable version of themselves they can muster up. They post their most flattering pictures and include a list of fun facts, all of which begin to run together. "Hi, I'm Caroline, and I love exploring new places, watching The Office, and eating, lol!" Reading through the posts made by my future classmates, I found myself thinking, "Yeah, I could be friends with that person," after reading every single post. They're generally unoriginal and not entirely informational, and the thought of creating one caused me an excessive amount of stress. I wrote and rewrote several drafts of a post of my own before eventually abandoning the effort. There was far too much to worry about. Do I tell people I'm majoring in English, even though I'm still a little undecided and haven't officially declared anything yet? Does my list of favorite books make me seem pretentious? Is listing favorite poets the lamest thing in the world? Should I mention my YouTube channel, or would that be too much of a shameless plug? Should I talk about my old school? Do I sound totally dumb? Do I sound like I'm trying too hard? What if there isn't a single person who responds? What makes me interesting? Why would anyone care at all what I have to say? In recreating my blog, I'm faced with similar internal crises. How do I introduce myself and my goals for this blog? How much background information is too much? Why would anyone care at all what I have to say??? You'd think, with the number of times I've restarted my blog, I'd be good at writing this first, introductory blog post. I started my first blog back during sophomore year, and I revamped various versions of that first blog several times throughout high school. But it's the summer before I start college, the summer before I move to New York City and reinvent myself in the typical "moving to NYC and starting a new life" way, and it's time that my blog had a completely fresh start. I assume that the only people reading this will be, like, my parents and a couple of my friends, so a big "about me" section doesn't feel totally necessary. Still: I'm Caroline, and I'm a writer. I grew up in a military family, so I lived a whole bunch of places, but most of my life has been spent in Alabama. In about two months, I'll be moving to New York City to start college, probably with either a major in English or journalism or some sort of communications, but I'm not totally decided. My "What do you want to be when you grow up?" has been fluctuating between various forms of creative writer for as long as I can remember. For the past few months it's been steadily set on singer-songwriter, but past future careers (all of which I still harbor some hope for) include playwright, author, and TV writer. I'm also looking for some sort of "real" job to pursue in case all of that doesn't pan out. It's fine. I have time to decide what I'm doing with my life. And until then, I plan to take in as much of NYC as I possibly can, writing about it all the while. All of my reasons for having this blog are pretty selfish. I want to be able to eventually look back at my growth throughout my first months of college. I need practice writing with the goal of publishing, since not a word of my recent writing has left the pages of my journal, and my editing skills have dulled. Plus, I like talking and writing about myself, and I like pretending my life is interesting enough to sustain a blog. So, here I am. If you’d like to read about my attempts at adventuring, finding myself, and whatever else it is you do when you start college and move to a big city, then you’re in the right place. I hope you’ll stick around. (By the way: Lidija Namike took the picture that accompanies this post! She took my senior pictures, and she’s great.)
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