“Feeling the uncomfortable”

Victoria Alarcon
Features & Opinions Editor
The first year of university is never easy. We wonder if we’ll make friends, we wonder if we’ll get the good marks, but most of all, we wonder if we’ll make it through the year.

We imagine university to be this big institution where we’re alone with no one to help us. It’s a place where we think 20-page papers are due every week, and where professors expect nothing but perfect papers handed in.
It’s where a lot of stress begins to grow, says author and nationally-syndicated advice columnist, Harlan Cohen.
“We are so worried about everyone else and what everyone else is going to think of us and we’re so worried about who likes us and who doesn’t like us. We’re so worried that things aren’t going to go as planned,” says Cohen, calling the first year of university the “like me” year.
With so many new faces and being pushed into a whole new experience, students long for everyone to like them and everything to be perfect so much that we’ll do anything to make sure it happens. It’s because of all the work that we do to achieve the impossible that stress becomes part of our lives.
“In order to get comfortable with the university experience and avoid stress,” explains Cohen, “there is one thing that we must do and that is that we must embrace the universal rejection truth. There are numerous universal rejection truths, but the college/university one is that not everything will work out as planned. The moment that you get that, people begin to get permission to be more forgiving of themselves.”
And it’s not easy to accept the universal rejection truths about university because rejection and making mistakes is such an uncomfortable feeling and if there’s anything that people hate more than anything, it’s discomfort. For many students, each will try to avoid the uncomfortable in their lives by eating and drinking. It’s no surprise why first-year students tend to gain extra weight after just a few months.
But according to Cohen, the uncomfortable is part of life.
“Uncomfortable is good, and uncomfortable is healthy,” he says. “When you’re uncomfortable you learn and if you can look at the uncomfortable not as bad moments, not as moments you want to avoid, but as moments where you can learn and give yourself permission to figure things out than you’ll feel lighter.”
And it’s not only the discomfort we feel when we didn’t get the mark we wanted or the person we wanted, but the discomfort we feel in our own skin.
“We’re uncomfortable in our physical thong and our emotional thong and we’re uncomfortable in our spiritual thong,” Cohen says. “We’re so uncomfortable and when you’re so uncomfortable in your thong, you’re always worrying about what everyone is thinking of you. It’s only the people that get comfortable in their thong physically, emotionally and spiritually that they’ll be able to look outward and be able to have permission to think whatever they want. We never learn how to see the world this way because all we learn is that we’re not good enough and that we’re defective.”
Whether it’s the images in magazines that have made us feel like we’re not physically good enough or the shows on television that have made us feel like we’re not emotionally good enough, we live in a world where we’re always trying to change ourselves to be better. All this when the answer to everything is that you’re fine just the way you are.
“Who likes me? Who wants me? Who wants to love me? What it should really be is who do I like? Where do I want to hang out with? Who are the people I want to hang around? And when people go into university with that mentality that’s when the best experience will begin,” says Cohen. “We’re all afraid of the same things and once you find out that everyone else is afraid of the same things then you can use that to find the courage to be vulnerable because if we’re all feeling it then it’s not just me, it’s something bigger than me.”
All students experience the first year of university in their own way, and it’s a huge leap to take after high school. Cohen, struggled and stressed in his first year, but when he took his own advice and began to feel more relaxed, he got to where he is today.
So if your life becomes a non-stop stress-fest, the easiest way to chill out is to just breathe and accept that not everything will be perfect, but it will work out at the end.