Mid-Semester Crisis

Survival may be a path paved by bravery, but it helps to have a Survival Guide for Dummies: 101. Unfortunately, college never provides you with anything quite as miraculous.

It’s halfway into the semester, and you are utterly clueless about what’s going on – be it class, or life in general, you find it hard to keep track of all the balls (the basketball kind) coming at you with ferocious velocities and seem to suddenly hit you from nowhere. Attempting to dodge and failing, you eventually accept life as that one kid whom you can’t seem to get the best of (read: Sharmaji’s son), plunging your esteem miles underground. Soon enough, your pockets are devoid of both cash and cares to spare.

Wikipedia defines midlife crisis as “a transition of identity and self-confidence that can occur in middle aged individuals”. Sounds awfully familiar to what college does to us no-longer-children-yet-barely-adults.
Money in your wallet goes missing-in-action way before the month ends, and you wish you had better financial skills, among other skills which currently don’t exist in your repertoire either. Food at your mess becomes something you grudgingly accept, just like your fate (unless you really did get into an IIT, after all the rigorous coaching institutes you dragged your poor soul through).

There don’t seem to be enough holidays when you miss home, and never enough sleep. Your attendance creeps up on you way too soon, and waking up for 8am classes becomes harder by the day (how did we ever go to school?). The dark circles under your eyes start looking bigger than your friends’ circle, and a 12-hour sleep becomes the ex you’re on bad terms with; laziness and procrastination become new favorite words to live by (time management and you never got along well, anyway). Full days make you want to crawl back to bed, and the stress piles up along with the dirty clothes on your chair.

If your life was the Titanic, assignments and sessionals would be the iceberg you assumed you had under control, before you realized how close they really were, unleashing a wave of panic, followed by the tremor of impact, and eventually, resignation to inevitable doom. Our study material, on the other hand, is like the internet- vast, important and seemingly impossible to go through. Some people are blessed with diligence. You, on the other hand constantly feel like Ion, where connecting to the network always takes “longer than usual”.

Yet, amidst the storm of chaos, you manage to pull through, and realize how much this whirlwind of insanity will be missed in the long months home. Survival guides are for dummies; we’re masters in the art of barely holding together our messed up lives.

We fall, we fail, we whine, we complain- yet we do it over again; for what’s love, without a tinge of hate?

— Tejal Khullar for MTTN