Change
Bex Rizo (She/Her)
Editorial Team Member
Change is inevitable. Whether you like it or not, in everyone 's life, they will encounter change. Change can be anything from changing the color of your hair to moving to a new state. For me, it was transitioning into my new life as a college student last fall. Little did I know, that would just be the beginning to a whole series of changes I can’t say I expected or prepared for.
I have always been academically inclined, and I’ve known I wanted to go to college for as long as I can remember. I also knew just what it took to get there: Good grades, extracurriculars, and sacrificing my time to achieve this goal. By my senior year I had finally applied to about three schools I wanted to go to. They were all local because I wanted to stay close to my family. I finally narrowed it down to one school which had been recommended by almost every person I knew who was in the field I wanted to go into. By the end of the summer, I was prepared and felt confident to begin my first year in college.
The first few weeks proved to be more challenging than what I had previously experienced. This was evident by getting my first B on a test, but I adjusted and got better grades on my other tests. Along with the tests being more difficult, came a challenging professor who made simple classes far more challenging than they needed to be. Once I had gotten used to it, it did not seem bad at all, and I even started having fun and made some friends. I had expected this transition to be difficult; what I had not expected was a trip to the emergency room in October.
During a normal Saturday, I was hanging out with my family, when I received a call from my mom. She told me she was having the symptoms of a stroke. We immediately raced home and drove her to the Emergency Room. My older siblings were called and they stayed with my two younger siblings while my Dad and I waited with my mom in the ER. Considering she had all the symptoms of a stroke, we thought she would be in and out within a few hours. However, by the time we got out, it was almost midnight and we had been there for over ten hours.
A lot of things changed that day. My mom ended up staying in the hospital for about a week and the doctors were clueless as to what was wrong. One of the hardest changes came at the end of the month, when my mom collapsed while I was at work and was taken by ambulance to the Emergency Room again. After that day, my parents both decided it would be better if my two younger siblings moved in with my Dad. My parents are divorced, and for as long as I can remember, we have all lived with my mom. My siblings leaving was one of the hardest changes I have had to experience. Some people say, the first year of college is the hardest and I am inclined to say that is true at least for me although, it may be for different reasons.
It can be difficult to understand why things in our lives have to change, but change is essential. If things never changed, we would never grow. It is also one of those things you don’t see coming. You may think some things in your life will stay the same forever, but you may be surprised to see just how different your life will be a year from now. If you would have told me a year ago my two best friends, my built-in buddies, and my favorite younger siblings would not live with me, I would not have believed you. But that's just the thing. Everything changes, even if we don’t want it to or don’t think it will.
The Walt Disney classic film The Fox and The Hound sums up my thoughts on change perfectly in saying, “Forever is a long, long time, and time has a way of changing things.”