Third term fears

Am I looking forward to throwing myself back into student life again? Well, yes. And no.

After a holiday of doing practically nothing (save a few books to read) but watch films and meet up with friends, the concept of starting to do work again is a little intimidating. The fact that this term will begin to count toward my overall degree isn't really helping matters. Time at home is amazing. Cooking and cleaning done for me is amazing. Seeing the friends I haven't seen for 10 weeks is amazing, and, in my case, not having to do any revision is amazing.

But on the other hand, time at home is crazily frustrating after the independence of university. I had no money, or felt guilty at spending it when I could get it; I couldn’t drive and the bus fares are ridiculously expensive in the country. That's not to say I don't have a car - I have a car – but the fact that it was just sat in the driveway taunting me was a daily reminder of my helplessness in that department. A sense of despondence gripped me on nights out, when all the pubs closed at 11.30, leaving my friends and I with nothing to do but to head home to our respective parents and try not to wake anyone up in a house where everyone had gone to bed at 10.

The one time I did stay out, to about half 1 – tame by university standards – I came home to find my mother still awake and waiting for me to come in, wanting to know where I had been when everything had closed hours ago. Oh, and why my knee was bleeding: the loss of my independence was particularly disconcerting that night.

I'm worried that at home I returned to normal sleeping patterns that are unfitted to the student life I led last term. At the beginning of the holiday, I couldn't easily get up before 10, and would often, much to the wonderment of my parents, stay up texting friends from university until 3 in the morning, as was my habit. By the end of my time at home, I was waking up at 8, feeling an actual aversion to logging onto the computer, and falling asleep by 10 most nights. It's a disturbing occurrence, even though I know it shouldn't be.

I'm worried about returning to university life again, because now I'm fully adjusted to home life – what if it's like the first few weeks of freshers all over again? The Christmas holidays didn't give me enough time to get so absorbed into the small-town psyche. Christmas was a rest, this holiday has seemed more like a return to the person I was before I came to university. I wonder when this stops happening? Will I get to my third year and still feel like this after the length of half a term at home?

I'm concerned it'll take time to adjust to my uni friends again. We'll have to make new in-jokes to replace the ones we forgot over Easter. I'm determined to work harder at my degree this term too – although I said that last term and never actually got round to it.

Most of all though, you may remember my desperate battle with the kitchen at the end of the last term? Well, I'm worried about that. A few weeks into the holiday, I received an email from Derwent College that had been sent to a few blocks en masse. It was about kitchens. It was about mess. It was about fines.

I'm really, really hoping it wasn't about me.

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