1st semester at Cal - can someone edit this for me? thx.

0Facing Life02br
02br
00To have the amount of time in one semester is not enough to experience Berkeley. I cannot truly say what Berkeley means or has done for me when it has three and a half more years to mold me. Then again, events within the past few months here have significantly influenced me. The first time I stepped off the BART train at the Downtown Berkeley BART station, I was filled with confusion seeing the passengers scrambling onto the escalator to get to their destinations. They all knew where they wanted to go, where they wanted to be. I, on the other hand, stood in uncertainty of my own destination. Like a child being led by her parent’s hand, I quietly shadowed my friend around campus. I thought, 01i00How can she know her way around, how can she know exactly where she was heading when I didn’t? 02i00I wondered,01i00 What am I doing here?02i00 The unfamiliarity of my surroundings helped me recognize how insignificant and small I was in this world. The idea that I would have my life figured out in the next four years reassured me up until now. I questioned just how much I can really accomplish in just four years. Do I really expect to find the perfect career in this time? Feeling completely lost, not only with directions, but also my own future, left me insecure and helpless. 02br
02br
00I passionately hated college. I hated staying up to write papers night after night. Even more, I hated receiving paper assignments one after the other when I had not even started on my paper that is due in twelve hours. This was not what I expected. My older friends have always told me college would be an easy breeze with one or two papers per semester, but now I see this isn’t true. Maybe it’s because I have bad luck in choosing classes with so many papers to write. Either way, I still hate writing papers and especially when I get papers with confusing prompts. I disliked wasting time at school like waiting until the end of a pointless discussion session to take the weekly quizzes in my Astronomy discussion. I detested having to walk thirty minutes across campus to get home from the FPF building or arriving at the bus stop just when the bus is leaving. 02br
02br
00My living situation was not all that great either. I am truly grateful for the boundless amount of privacy I get from living in an apartment, but it’s not as wonderful as what many think. College is supposed to be a time to explore, to start over, to make new friends, but I wasn’t doing any of these things. I did not make any real new friends I could call up and talk to, or go out to lunch with. I had no new friends to go exploring with either. As the weeks dragged on, I began to retreat into my own shell. I did not bother to say “hi” to random people in class anymore and was no longer optimistic that I could find a good friend. Everybody had already formed their own cliques. My roommates weren’t people I would even consider my friends. Occasionally I would have a quick chat with them, but it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t and couldn’t trust them. They were completely random people who I just happened to be sharing a home with. Two of them even had the audacity to eat my food and use my belongings without asking or telling me they had used it. When I asked my roommates if any of them were using my body soap, one asked me back, “Are you sure you’re not hallucinating”. It became uncomfortable for me to be staying in the same room with someone who could boldly lie to me. I hated feeling awkward in a place that was supposed to be my home away from home.02br
02br
00Then again, I didn’t really hate 01i00everything 02i00about this place. Without warning, the weather here has unpredictably turned lazy warm afternoons to chilly nights as the burning sun would be overtaken by clouds. It constantly reminds me that one major slip and my future can be as turbulent as the gloomy clouds. I can still hear the plitter platter sounds of the first rainy day in the city. Watching the gentle rain fall on the large trees scattered around campus comforted me while I sat in front of the largest window in my apartment. Walking through a different route on campus once, I was astonished to discover narrow trails hidden within giant trees with tips that barely reached the blue sky. It created an illusion that I was in nature’s home with the flowing calm sounds of the creeks. I remember seeing the glistening warm hues of a sunset and the evening fog gliding in to erase away the bay as it engulfed the Golden Gate Bridge. Berkeley has many small aspects that gave it a nice distinction and gained my appreciation. At times, it didn’t seem so bad to be here. Even in a bustling city, there were little nooks where one could find a peace of mind.02br
02br
00I was unprepared for the situations I would encounter at Cal; particularly when I got lost. There was a time when I couldn’t figure out how to find my way out of the life sized maze of the Moffitt Library on my own. The many passages and doors leading to mysterious rooms, the hundreds of shelves covered with dusty books of acquired knowledge, and the dozens of heads hovering over thick textbooks all lacked distinctiveness in my mind. I didn’t feel comfortable asking for directions to the exit because the studying students’ faces seemed uninviting. Unable to mark my path I continued to walked on not knowing where I would end up. I did not only lose my way leaving the library, but I even lost my way trying to leave Unit 1 my first time there. Walking out to a street I did not recognize without a single person in sight, I could hear the quickened pounding of my heart. Wandering aimlessly around the building complexes in the dark and promising myself I’ll never go out at night again, I was taken over by fear. Fear I would stay lost for the next couple hours and nobody would know I was gone. 02br
02br
00The independence, anonymity, and loneliness were what I most detested. Although the lack of nagging family members was appreciated, it left me feeling depressed because I have never been away from my home for more than a few weeks. Independence gave me the freedom to achieve great heights or to fall into the depths of failure. The choices were endless: Should I be productive and spend my time going to lectures and studying until I couldn’t look at a book anymore, or should I waste all of my time watching Youtube clips and sleeping? My dad was not there to be my alarm clock and pull me off of my bed in the mornings anymore. There were no grade reports or teachers to push me forward, and especially no friends to pull all-nighters with. It made me depressed that I was on my own, that I was responsible for myself, that I was just another faceless person floating in a crowd. Every minute I spent in Berkeley was something I greatly dreaded. All I ever thought about was getting to go back home to my big comfy bed in my own room and not have to worry about homework, about the future, about my life. 02br
02br
00It was the Wednesday before school started when I sat in the back seat of my car parked in front of a fraternity house. My dad and cousin were out searching for a place for me to live during the semester. There were used plates, cups, and other trash scattered around the front lawn. Countless Cal students walked pass the car in their fraternity or Cal logo t-shirts and I imagine myself as becoming one of them in the next few weeks. My dad came back after twenty minutes to tell me he couldn’t find any place for rent in the area. I was still living in my own little safety bubble waiting for others to take care of my problems. However, in just these three months, I have begun to rely on myself rather than others. During the last week of November, I was insanely stressed out from frantically searching for someone to sublet my place in my apartment. Although this sounds cliché, I spent every waking moment thinking about how horrible my life is and how much money I would be wasting on rent. Just because I signed a one year lease and was unable to find a replacement, I would still have to pay for my spot in the apartment. Without knowing, I was taking care of my own business. Staying up beyond midnight to find people on craigslist.org who needed housing and reposting my ad every five hours gave me a major headache. But even more, Berkeley changed me without me ever noticing. The change crept up on me unexpectedly. While everyone is freaking out about finals, I am freaking out about how I can afford to pay for both rent and a dorm next semester. Is this what it means to be responsible? To be an adult? 02br
02br
00My old high school friends have repeatedly commented that I have changed, that I’m different from the last time they saw me in June. I used to deny all this and say I’m the same weird idiot they knew back in high school, but now I am beginning to accept what they said is true. I did less than half of what most Berkeley students have done in their first semester because I stayed cooped up in my room 90% of the time. I haven’t been to a single party, haven’t joined any clubs, haven’t gone to the top of the clock tower, haven’t found a single friend to hang out with outside of class, nor have I slept over in a dorm before. The experiences that I did gain, though, have changed me. The responsibilities I have acquired have made me more focused on my priorities. I depend on myself to fix my own problems rather than others. I can say that I hate college, but what about college is there to hate? It’s not actually college that I hate, but the responsibility, freedom, and getting used changes that I hate. It’s being too old to be constantly pestered and reminded to do things. It’s growing up. It’s facing reality.02br
02br
02br
02br
00 0-