Stress and Transition: My Freshman Year of College

When I think about stress, many scenarios and experiences come flooding back to my brain. Stress is something that I am very familiar with and wish that I had less of. One of the most recent and stressful experiences in my life was moving into college my freshman year. Moving in wasn’t where all the stress was, it was everything that dealt with the process. It was the daunting thoughts of never making friends. The lonely feeling I got while I watched my parents drive away. The longing I had to be with people that were very familiar to me. All of this combined, made my first week of college, extremely stressful. The first night sitting in my new dorm room all alone I called my best friend. She seemed bubbly and quite content with her college situation at that time. I wondered how we could be facing the same thing, yet she was taking it so well. In chapter 5, it explains how not everyone experiences stress the same way. People can experience the same situation, but they may perceive and interpret it differently (Butcher, James, & Neal 2015). This is where the first factor played in. Psychologically, I had psyched myself out about college the whole

While I was so stuck in my brain, I was not realizing that God was working through me in ways I could not see. A girl on my floor approached me and told me that she saw me crying the first night. She said that she believed that God was telling her that we would be great friends. She was such a great first friend at Lincoln Christian. We got deep one night and poured out our hearts to each other. Through that I learned that a contributing factor to my stress was some of the ties I still had back home. I didn’t realize it at the time but through my friend and God I learned that my relationship I had back at home was not what God wanted. I then broke up with my boyfriend and I felt like the weight of the world was lifted off my