Nervous School Days

The first day of school always makes me nervous, no matter what level. When it was the first day of kindergarten, I was nervous because I wasn’t sure who would play with me (I wasn’t too keen on the fact that I was supposed to be learning). When it was the first day of elementary school, where I was in school for a full day, I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to stay awake all day. When it was the first day of middle school, I was nervous that my classes would be too easy or too hard and I was also nervous about changing classes every hour and whether or not I would remember the combination to my locker. When it was the first day of high school, I was nervous that I wouldn’t make any friends, that I would be an outcast, that I would fail all my classes. When it was the first day of classes at boarding school, I was nervous that I would not be able to keep up with the course work. And now here I am, it’s the first day of classes at college and suddenly I’m not so nervous. It’s an odd phenomenon. The previous first days of school, the first days of new buildings, teachers, subjects and friends I had trivial reasons to be nervous. But now, as I approach this new setting, these new teachers, these harder classes, I find myself well prepared and not fearing what comes next. I attribute this new attitude towards school to have come from spending 2 years at boarding school. And while I feel like whenever I say I went to boarding school that people always have one of two thoughts enter their brains: 1). They think I’m a troubled student or persona and my parents sent me away or 2). They think I must be rich. Well I am neither, and I’m certainly not trying to brag that I went to such a prestigious school, but the fact remains I got the chance to experience what college is like (somewhat), I just had to endure the ups and downs of high school along with it.
As I expected I felt very comfortable in my Spanish class, this morning at 8 a.m. It has been almost a year since I last took a Spanish class but everything came flowing back to me. My past years of Spanish came back so ardently, in fact that after I began speaking for a little while I Spanish, I couldn’t help translating all of my thoughts into Spanish. Once I open the floodgate, it’s hard to close it back up.
But back to the first day of school. The first day of school, the entering into a new era of learning, no matter what the level is something we all go through. We may not all achieve the same levels but almost everyone has experienced the first day of school at least once. And once is all it takes to bring the barrage of butterflies into the stomach, churning the half-eaten breakfast and the summer’s worth of dreams and expectations for the new experience. I am a college freshman, I am entering a new world as of today, I am a student on the first day of school and I am not nervous. My expectations have been far exceeded and now I focus my attention on the task at hand, learning something new that I can take to the next level at keep the mariposas bonitas (beautiful butterflies) that usually storm my internal organs, at bay.