We’d all like to be free, it seems. We’ve pursued freedom under countless circumstances. When young, we wanted to be free from the constant watch under our parents or babysitters. We wanted to be free from the rules of the classroom, not to mention homework and tests. As we transition into young adulthood in our teenage years, we wanted to be free of our parents’ nagging (this time, more permanently).
With few exceptions, most of us have wished for some kind of freedom or another. While some have led to good results (e.g. our first Amendment), others not so much. The desire for freedom is really a double-edge sword, despite that the word always has a good ring to it.
Throughout the parts of my life that I lived with my mother, I’ve always wanted to become free from her constant advice-giving and nagging about every aspects of my life, especially regarding health-related issues.
“You have to drink at least eight glasses of water per day, or you’ll be dehydrated!”
“You have to sleep before 11 p.m., or your health will deteriorate!”
“You can’t stare at the computer for more than an hour in one sitting, or your eyesight will be even worse!”
“You can’t eat that ice cream / cookie / cake / mochi / bubble tea, it’s nothing but saturated fat!”
I was really sick of hearing all that, repeated over and over again many times throughout the day, and the day repeats itself 365 times a year. I knew she meant well, but I felt that my life was about to drown in her spit as she bombarded day after day, year after year.
Finally I went to college, and I became free of all that. She and I had a hemisphere’s distance as the “buffer zone” between us. I felt freedom that I had never felt before.
So for the purpose of going to parties, studying, or merely chatting with friends and staying “in”, I always stayed up late, even to the point of completely flipping my schedule around. I was living Beijing time. I was okay and, to be frank, ecstatic, for the first couple years, since my body was still young and could cope with the change, while my nerves so excited for college to the point that any signs of fatigue were disregarded. My messed up biological clock, however, eventually caught up to me. I began to have constant headaches and fell sick more frequently than before. My weight fluctuated immensely, thanks to my irregular eating habits. There were times when I could neither concentrate on school nor my social life. It was a lose-lose situation.
In my senior, my life finally started to get back to normal. It was better too late than never, I thought. I went to the gym multiple times a week, slept before midnight (or tried to), had a healthier diet, and re-prioritized my life. Also, I found that I was not alone in my struggles. Many of my friends had similar problems, some more severe than mine. I knew people who even fainted because of fatigue, and became hospitalized.
College is a time of freedom, but also of making choices. Although as young adults we now have the freedom to make these choices, but we have to be aware of the consequences. So perhaps, we can never be completely free in the sense that we can just do whatever we feel like doing, whenever we feel like it.
As we move out of college, build our career and expand our social circle, there will be even less guidance from our parents and mentors, and it’s up to us to make the right choices. Believe it or not, there will be times when we wish our parents could tell us what to do, but they are not there to do so.