Sophomore Girl Syndrome

It's been a month.
Because I promised to write something happier and less cynical than usual.
And that's been a daunting task.
Because as it turns out, life is hard.
Always.
When you're a sophomore girl at BYU.
And you decide to make one long run-on sentence into twelve fragments.
Because you're allowed to do that to add flair to your writing.
I think it shows voice.
Or that you're a non-conforming Indie kid.
Or are related to one.
That last one would be me.
Anyways, we're moving on to full sentences for a little bit. I almost started this sentence with "because," but then I remembered my promise from 5 seconds ago, so don't worry; it's a real sentence. So life at BYU is still good (adj: satisfactory in quality, quantity, or degree), but it is also still hard. Here are some reasons why life is hard for most sophomore girls at BYU, though some are specific to me. You'll know which ones.

• All of your guy friends have abandoned you for two years to do something really good (adj: morally excellent, virtuous, righteous, pious), which is great because they are changing peoples' lives and bringing them to Christ. Except that all of the sudden the girls they left behind don't know how to replace their entire group of male friends with older ones. So awkwardness abounds.

• Maybe you had some guy that you really liked your freshman year and then he left on a mission. Maybe you had two. I guarantee that 82% of all freshman girls were interested in someone, and then that boy left the world and more importantly, your world, and now you have no motivation to meet anyone new. I have at least five girls who can give testimonials to that (keep in mind I don't have many friends right now, so that's a high percentage).

• Maybe you didn't work freshman year because you wanted to get used to how college worked. And now you are working and you have no idea what you did with all your extra time last year. And then you realize that you had friends and did social things. Now you mostly just work and do homework. And call your mom. But you love work and know it's a good (adj: right, proper, or fit) thing.

• This is the time of your life where you have to solidify major decisions. Like your major, what you want to do after graduation (career?!) and with the rest of your life, if you want to study abroad and if so, where, if you want to go on a mission (which, might I add, is a very difficult decision for a girl to make), what you want to have for dinner (I know, we're getting into the big things), and at BYU, marriage is always a floating thought. But you never know when it will happen. You're not planning on it coming soon, but there are an awful lot of married people....everywhere. But usually if you're stuck on bullet point #2, you don't think about that too much.

• Money starts to become a real thing, not just an imaginary number (not the math kind, but the I-don't-think-it-really-exists kind). 

• You start asking yourself big questions about life, like what you want out of it, what will make you happy, where you want to go. Freshmen year is too much fun to get bogged down by reality. So when you look back, you might not even know if it was real or not.

• The unknown is ever present!

• Reemphasizing points number 1 and 2; it's hard to make a whole new set of friends. Or to even want new friends sometimes. It was too recent to forget about the old ones.

• You realize that not everyone graduates college and there is more than one road in life. Most people probably knew that before me, but I didn't give it a lot of thought before.

So we will keep on trying to transition to life. Even though it's hard. Because we'll have to do it for the rest of our lives anyways. Somehow, we never quite get used to being alive.