Growing Pains: The Junior Experience

Lately, I’ve been feeling more like a freshman than a junior. I walk around campus and look into an overwhelming sea of unfamiliar faces: returning seniors from study abroad whom I was too intimidated to approach before they left and unself-aware freshmen whom I have no desire to approach now. With half my grade scattered across the globe, I’m left behind feeling outnumbered and misplaced. 

I open Instagram to a classmate lounging on a beach in Ibiza, or on a party boat in Croatia, and their lives feel so far removed from my own at Amherst that I can’t even romanticize them — I can hardly believe they’re real. Some of my best friends are among that population abroad. Each day, I grieve their absence — a strange kind of grief since I know they’re not gone forever — and my family attempts to comfort me with the same affirmation: “They’ll be back before you know it. A semester flies by.” But their words only force me to jump forward into a life months and months ahead of the current one I am living, and by the time my friends return, I’ll be leaving to start my own abroad journey. We’ll miss each other for an entire year, only to reunite as seniors; I’m not only pressured into thinking ahead to next spring, but also all the way to next year. 

Envisioning this other life reassures me, but in a strange, out-of-body way. Within a year, I will have changed in ways I could have never anticipated. I will have experiences that I could have never predicted, and yet I’m already imagining my future self so distinctly. The result is a kind of identity dissonance: I’m a junior who feels like a freshman, already picturing myself as a senior. 

Lately, conversations with friends have been dominated by the now seemingly quintessential question, “Remember when … ?” At the surface, it seems simply rhetorical. But underneath is an invitation: to reminisce, to co-author a memory, to confirm what happened was real. When the receiver adds a small detail — the time of day, who was there, a specific said quote — it relieves the burden of remembering alone. This thing that we shared was real, right? Don’t you remember? It’s comforting to have so many good memories to look back on, yet the recent frequency of these conversations has unsettled me, considering that just two years ago, we didn’t yet have a past to pull from. Combined with the excitement of looking ahead, I feel suspended between memory and anticipation instead of living in the present. 

The past moments we recall are already fixed — completed and self-contained, just as “aspect” in grammar marks events as ongoing or already finished. Aspect, as linguists describe it, is not simply about tense but about how we experience events in time — whether they are ongoing, habitual, completed, or bounded. As a result, language pushes me to experience the present as nothing more than a continuous past, slipping into memory the instant it arrives. 

Similarly, I’ve been feeling an increasing pressure to document each moment of my life, no matter how small. I have a pressing desire to journal manically, take pictures of every single thing I do, and create a playlist for each month of my life. I don’t want to solely rely on another person’s fragile memory when a written entry, photograph, or song can accurately, tangibly, and objectively capture these moments for me instead. Not only do I need validation that they happened in the first place, but I need to know how they happened as well. At the same time, however, I find myself too anxious to pull out the camera in fear of ruining the moment or taking myself out of it. 

Coming of age in high school meant having no idea who you were and trusting that college would help you figure that out later — it was completely unserious and exhilarating. But what happens when that uncertainty isn’t at the forefront of your college experience anymore? When you’ve finally accepted who you are with every quirk and imperfection. As a junior, it’s no longer about identity, but about time. 

I used to be encouraged to try as many things as possible, but when you’re closer to the end than you are to the beginning, it feels like you should just finish strong instead of starting all over again. With only three semesters left at Amherst, every one of my choices carries a heavy weight of opportunity cost. For the first time during add/drop, I felt the pressure of what little is left, shopping four classes a day to find the ones that mattered most to me. When each decision feels like it defines not just one semester but my last years of college, the stakes feel higher than ever. 

In high school, I was constantly warned, “These four years will go by faster than you realize — make them count, and don’t take them for granted.” At fourteen, I couldn’t understand this simple advice, but hearing it again now, I finally do. My identity — once again grounded in when I will graduate — feels different this time around. It isn’t captured by TikToks while “Landslide” or “Slipping Through My Fingers” plays lightly in the background. It isn’t like listening to a Hannah Montana song as an homage to your childhood. College graduation doesn’t have the same sentimental tone as high school graduation. This feeling is sharper, more real, and harder to romanticize. It’s more like Friko’s “Where We’ve Been” — a song about outgrowing a space or a certain time in your life. 

It starts off as a calming melody with soft lyrics and gentle guitar strums. But it quickly picks up, the voice becoming increasingly urgent, cracking at times, and sounding like it’s on the edge of breaking down. By the end, the initial lullaby is unrecognizable, replaced by a crescendo of cacophonic banging and shouting in its place. 

“Where We’ve Been” reminds me of what it’s like to realize how quickly a moment, a phase, an era has passed by you — the frustration of knowing you cannot control time. Even the title itself asserts a resistance to being stagnant, suggesting there is always somewhere else to move next. The past-tense verb, “been,” linguistically reinforces motion, reminding us that we are never fixed in time or place and are constantly shifting between where we were, where we are, and where we are going. I’m left looking for songs just like this one to help articulate my thoughts and feelings and to antidote my growing pains. 

But when I look up songs about growing up on Spotify, an AI-generated playlist personally curated for me pops up. Instead of introducing me to new music, it regurgitates old songs I have already cycled through — tracks I have already once hyper-fixated on. I’m left feeling frustrated, my desire for novelty unsatisfied. And yet, I am also comforted by the nostalgia these familiar melodies carry. In a way, even Spotify urges me to look backward rather than forward, as if growing up can only be captured through what I already know. 

I find myself listening to the anthems my friends and I overplayed last spring when we’d drive down South Pleasant Street with the windows down and sun shining bright through the dashboard, pretending we were on our very own respective hometown roads. It sometimes felt just like high school, and I can’t remember what feels more disconcerting: to wonder where all the months went from last spring or to wonder where all the years went the last time I was a junior? 

This feeling is not uniquely tethered to being a junior in college. It endlessly recurs throughout our lives — starting your first job, getting engaged, moving to a new city, becoming a parent for the first time. We will always keep growing up and growing older, and at each stage, we will experience the familiar uneasy tension of what has passed, what’s to come, and what is currently slipping by us. 

I don’t have the perfect solution, but I’m responding by trying to intentionally create whenever I can — photographing, collaging, writing, reading, listening, talking. These archives prove to me, more than anyone else, that I have lived, changed, and progressed. In a year from now, I know I’ll return to this article and laugh at how young and naive I seemed, but I will also be grateful for the evidence of who I was. 

Yet, intentional creation also asks us to restrain. Sometimes, the most meaningful way to honor a moment is to leave it undocumented — knowing when actively not to put the pen to paper, and trusting only your own memory instead. Sometimes, we must selfishly gatekeep and resist the urge to preserve moments for our future selves — even if we might entirely forget them — in order to be entirely intimate with today. 

The present is fleeting, but it is not gone. It’s a gift that asks us not to do everything, but to appreciate what we currently have before it passes by. As Hirayama in “Perfect Days” (2023) put it simply: “Next time is next time. Now is now.” 

Songs that encompass my growing pains: 

• “Where We’ve Been” by Friko
• “Changes, Pts. 1 & 2” by Neal Francis 
• “Word I Used” by The Backseat Lovers 
• “Spring into Summer” by Lizzy McAlpine
• “Your New Favorite Song” by Wallows 
• “At Home” by Slow Pulp