Freshman year you sort of get cared about for free. After that, people will still care about you, but they'll expect you to meet them half-way, to reach out to them and show them you want to be friends. Junior year is great because you're settled and confident enough that it isn't as /scary/ to reach out.
If it's any comfort, sophomore and senior years are probably harder than freshman and junior years. Imagine freshman year as childhood, sophomore year as adolescence, junior year as adulthood, and senior year as senescence, and you aren't that far off the mark.
That makes sophomore year the place where lots of people alternate between yearning for the protection given freshman and itching for the responsibility given upperclassmen, of growing disillusioned with the old guard and trying to figure out how to carve out a place for yourself. I don't promise that the beginning of next year will suddenly be perfect (we can all attest that young adulthood can be pretty rocky), but if you follow true to form, I predict that at some point next year you'll find that you've reached a stable and satisfactory equilibrium (perhaps surprisingly far away from where you started, or perhaps surprisingly close.)
(It's not quite that bad as all that for seniors, of course. You deal with some of the same issues of learning to accept that you'll lose the world you've known, and that it will change and go on without you. On the other hand, you pass away from it not into oblivion but into the rest of your life--a pretty good deal, all things considered).
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branchandroot
Senescent babble
Date: 2006-09-08 05:42 pm (UTC)Junior year is great because you're settled and confident enough that it isn't as /scary/ to reach out.
If it's any comfort, sophomore and senior years are probably harder than freshman and junior years. Imagine freshman year as childhood, sophomore year as adolescence, junior year as adulthood, and senior year as senescence, and you aren't that far off the mark.
That makes sophomore year the place where lots of people alternate between yearning for the protection given freshman and itching for the responsibility given upperclassmen, of growing disillusioned with the old guard and trying to figure out how to carve out a place for yourself. I don't promise that the beginning of next year will suddenly be perfect (we can all attest that young adulthood can be pretty rocky), but if you follow true to form, I predict that at some point next year you'll find that you've reached a stable and satisfactory equilibrium (perhaps surprisingly far away from where you started, or perhaps surprisingly close.)
(It's not quite that bad as all that for seniors, of course. You deal with some of the same issues of learning to accept that you'll lose the world you've known, and that it will change and go on without you. On the other hand, you pass away from it not into oblivion but into the rest of your life--a pretty good deal, all things considered).