How To Be a Student

"Turning the corner onto Lafayette Avenue, I looked at my arm.

It was covered in goosebumps for the sixth time in the last 50 minutes. I’d been counting. Two hours later, the pain had set in and I was incapable of thinking anything so small. At that moment, there were 26.2 miles of the New York Marathon behind and I was crossing the finish line in Central Park.

It was a long time coming—eight months and three hours to be exact—of turning pain into more pain."

"I had the game of my life, scoring two tries to secure our ticket to nationals. When the final whistle blew, the score read 20-10 for Queen’s. Everyone was cheering and crying and bursting with excitement.

But I felt nothing.

In a moment where I would normally be overflowing with emotion — and embarrassingly drowning in a puddle of happy tears — I was numb. This is the most frustrating part about living with a mood disorder like depression."

"Getting too comfortable in your environment is a sin. After a run-in with a local Kingston resident, I realized that’s for good reason.

After three years in Kingston, I’ll admit my cockiness has the tendency to get the better of me. I tend to forget I live in a real town and not a student jungle gym. My most recent wake-up call involved a pylon, a Fiat, and an angry, elderly Kingstonian."

"I was devastated when my brother left for school. After moving him into his residence, I said goodbye and drove back to Canada with my parents. I was alone in the backseat of the car for the first time in my life.

Despite being surrounded by my closest friends and family at home, there wasn’t a single person who could fill the gap he left in my daily life when he moved away. I felt abandoned, and I was lonely in a way I’d never experienced before."

"One month into my first year at Queen’s, I wanted to drop out and go home.

There wasn’t anything wrong with Queen’s. In fact, it was the opposite: there was something wrong with me—or so I told myself. Early in the year, I decided that I was wholly inadequate and unqualified to be a Queen’s student, that I was a simpleton destined to toil away in mediocrity for the rest of my life, and that I would never thrive at this university because everyone else was better than me."