Your relatives are coming. I hope you read that with the same fervor of Jon Snow’s “winter is coming” and can imagine the incoming character death and gut-wrenching scenes that come along with it. That is the equivalent of having to see your relatives during the holidays.
Don’t get cocky because you survived Thanksgiving. Spoiler alert, Thanksgiving is just the walk into the gym. December starts the actual work out.
You haven’t seen anything yet. You’ll have relatives asking the same dreaded questions. You’ll bump into the people you wished you would never see again while shopping in Wegmans. And you’ll have the reality of your impending future swirling around you. Happy holidays!
How’s West Chester? What classes are you taking? What’s your major again? Are you dating anyone? How on earth is a sweetie like you still single? You know, Aunt Carol, I’m starting to wonder the same exact thing.
The list is endless and so are the amount of people asking you. They mean well, and some are genuinely interested, but the only reason I’m home is so I can recover from the hell that was finals week. I’m home for a break from school and my social life there. My break is not meant to include constant reminders about it by a nosy uncle who didn’t even go to college himself.
At least you can move to another room to escape your family members. But, you know who there is no escaping from? That kid from your high school English class that almost ran you over with his cart to get in the checkout lane before you.
My high school years weren’t horrible. In fact, I had a pretty nice time there, but the other students that also attended said high school weren’t as fun. I’m sure they’re doing great at whatever school they shipped off to but if I didn’t care in high school, why would I care now?
Let’s be real, we are faking being adults by attempting small talk in the chips aisle. The reality of the situation is that I’m trying to sneakily pick up the family size bag of potato chips without them (accurately) thinking that I’m going to eat the whole bag by myself.
It’s the constant struggle of trying to prove how much better you are than you were in high school while masking how untrue that really is. It’s tiring to talk to them, and I would much rather just avoid it at all costs.
However, I can’t really avoid them because soon they won’t just be the people I see every December, but instead the people I actively avoid on a daily basis. Because not only are my relatives asking about graduation but now so are my fellow soon to be graduates.
To put it simply, no thank you. I don’t want to think about graduating and becoming an adult. I want to pretend that Santa exists again and that the Elf on the Shelf moves all by himself.
Graduation is sneaking up behind me and being home for the holidays is really making my commitment to pretending it’s not happening very hard.
In the end the only thing I can say to all my fellow students who are travelling home for the holidays is: good luck and “May the odds be ever in your favor.”
Katie Ryan is a fourth-year student majoring in communication studies with a minor in journalism. She can be reached at SP828988@wcupa.edu.