A College Student's Perspective: Life Is a Struggle

By Anthony Romero on February 27, 2017

It’s incredible to think about my journey to get here. Believe it or not, I think it is a thought that can apply to most of our rising college students. Plenty of us have overcome quite a few obstacles to get where we are, and I think we ought to take some time to appreciate ourselves for trying to reach a potential or goal of ours.

So, with that said, I hope you don’t mind if I look at my life sort of in review on here. Life isn’t easy, at least, not for most of us. Life is a struggle, might even be a more accurate saying. We all have our problems or obstacles. For me, my success thus far began in high school, its first year. Ironically, it was also in high school that one of my biggest failures occurred.

My first two years, freshman and sophomore, I was almost a purely academics-oriented student. I did nothing else but study, engage my body, and sleep. A few examples are my day-to-day life which consisted of showing up at the school at 5 in the morning. I would always awake at four, shower, and study up a bit. When I got to school each day, the gates were barely opening; generally, I did my best to do homework. I was very stingy about making sure all my assignments were done at school, which is, perhaps, another example of that exemplary principle I held to.

After school, when I was home, I would go running; I was very invested in martial arts as well. There were a few flavors of entertainment with the janitors that I won’t get into, but my mornings weren’t always so strict. They simply usually were. During this time, failure was constant in a lot of personal ways. Maybe I didn’t endure my runs as long as I thought I should have, or I messed up on a question per a test or homework; maybe I was frustrated with a particular technique with my Muay Thai. Either way, at the time, failure was never intangible. It wasn’t permanent.

However, about midway through my third year and fourth year, that is my junior and senior days, I began to lose steam. I was finding myself wearing thinner and thinner, but I always tried to perform at my peak levels. By this time, I was in the Marine DEP. I was training with them as well as focusing on my studies and outside exercising.

Unfortunately, I was simply tired in more ways than I could realize. It wasn’t long before I began to experience migraines in abundance, and it’s important to note that I’ve never had one before this time as far as I could remember. Something drastic would come to happen three months before school was going to end: anxiety attacks, loss of balance, depression, and epileptic moments where I thought I was having seizures. All of it was stress induced, as told by the ER that prescribed Depakote and Amitriptyline.

For those last two months of school, I was entirely unable to move. I slipped into a comatose state for four whole months and managed to lose my diploma. When I woke up, everything was gone, my aspirations lost to unfortunate recklessness and what many would describe as personal failure.

Suddenly, failure was all too permanent.

I didn’t know what to do — I was at a complete loss for ideas and words and slowly began to forget about this energy called ambition. I had a conversation some months afterward with my uncle.

He said, “Failure’s just something said by people who stop trying, bud.” That line changed my entire life.

I came to realize, I needed to get my feet under me again, and that no one but myself was responsible for making me happy or successful. So, I moved to Idaho and I started working construction, with nothing but determination and sheer force of will carrying me along while I stayed with an uncle I will never be able to appreciate enough.

Eventually, I found a job at a manufacturing facility and moved into a trailer by myself, though I lived near my workaholic grandparents who would go on to teach me more stable work ethics as they approached me with information. An online school held an opportunity for me. I could challenge both classes I had failed, which were government and college algebra, take the SAT, and possibly realign myself for college.

It was a tough path because I used three months of studying to barely pass those tests; it had been filled with information I had barely remembered, my mind still quite muddled at the time. I did my best, managed to pass, and then managed to do decent on my SAT. Honestly, I was extremely proud and eternally happy that such a chance found me in a completely foreign environment. A much different personality of people live in Idaho, and I will never forget their kindness.

At the end of it all, I managed to obtain a $32,000 scholarship to the University of Advancing Technology, an institution I currently attend. I was in tears when I received the call because I had originally applied with skeptical notions. I find myself doing online courses today, but there will be no squandering of it.

And, like me, you ought to take a moment and realize how far you’ve all come. We still have plenty of work ahead of us, but we’ve come a long way. Be proud of yourself. We’re all going to be going a lot further, I hope. Life is a struggle, and it’s our struggle. We’ll keep on keeping on, no matter what comes our way.

As my favorite comedian, John Mulaney has said: “It’s 100 percent easier not to do anything than to do something. The fact that you’d do anything at all is remarkable.”

www.theodysseyonline.com

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