For me, Friday doesn’t signal the release from the doldrums of the week. Rather, it signals a fresh wave of anxiety about what my plans are for the weekend. My “Friday Scaries” send me into a vortex of worry each week without fail, and as I head toward graduation, and the ultimate lifelong weekend of postgrad life that follows, I wonder about how to spend my time.
Though it seems like everyone is going out each weekend night — at least according to Snapchat and Instagram — logically, I know it’s only a tiny fraction of all of the students who go to Binghamton University. If even 1,000 people go out on a Friday night, there are still at least 10,000 other students who are doing something else, a number that usually includes me. But I don’t broadcast the fact that I’m not doing anything exciting, so I don’t really know what other people who aren’t going out are doing and it makes me wonder if I am doing the right things — whatever that might mean.
Plus, because I don’t like to go out, due to a combination of social anxiety and other reasons, my weekends don’t have any social structure. If I don’t reach out and make plans with friends, I get sucked into lonely days split between the library and work. And so it goes that as Friday afternoon approaches, I begin to worry about how I’ll fill up each weekend. In the spirit of full disclosure, I scan B-Line with hope, but there is never anything that fits what I’m looking for.
Part of my problem with weekends is that I don’t know what I am looking for. I do a lot of things I love at BU, but in general, college has left me little time to really develop hobbies and interests that can sustain me after I graduate. It seems like a small thing to have asked of my undergraduate years, but as my young adult life stretches ahead of me, I dread coming to the weekends and having them be empty. Watching Netflix and taking Buzzfeed quizzes aren’t hobbies, but after I give my energy to schoolwork and everything else required of me, I have little left to give to learning something substantial to occupy myself with. Part of college is learning to be alone and to be happy with yourself, but I wish I had learned something practical to fill my time, too.
As each school year has come to a close, and now particularly as college is ending, I wonder if I should have spent more time at house parties or at the bars — or whether I should be happy that in a time when I felt like I should be doing one thing, I did what I actually wanted to do instead. These questions lead me into their own trap with the word “should.” Whether I wish things had been one way or another, they were the way they were. I made the choices I thought were right at the time and then moved forward from there. I don’t want to look back on college and think about what I “should have” done, I want to remember fondly what I did do.
Georgia Westbrook is a senior majoring in art history