College is a pressure cooker these days.
Resources feel scarce.
Time? Even scarcer.
When it’s supposed to be the best time of my life, it mostly just feels like a long stretch of not knowing what comes next. I’m surrounded by people who look like they have it all figured out, and it makes the doubt louder.
So I went to SXSW.
Specifically the SHE Media Co-Lab.
It was a shock to the system.
I was the youngest person in the room by a wide margin, which usually triggers a specific type of social panic. I expected to feel small.
Instead, I listened.
I watched women from a generation older than me talk about their own versions of hell. It turned out my anxiety wasn’t unique to being twenty and broke. These women had survived their own roller coasters and were still standing. Not just standing, but laughing.
Why did I let the fear win?
Kate Bowler spoke up. She’s a best-selling author and she had a simple, hard truth for us: be honest about what holds you down. It goes against every grain of our current culture, right? We are obsessed with productivity. With curating a perfect, unshakeable facade. She argued that happiness comes from dropping the act. Vulnerability is a radical act. It lets you connect with people who are struggling too, rather than pretending you are fine when you are not.
Then came Chaunte Lowe.
She is an Olympic gold medalist who was diagnosed with breast cancer during her career. She showed up on a panel called “Winning Women” and pulled an Olympic medal out of her pocket. The room lit up. Not just at the medal, but at the story. She talked about success even when your body betrays you.
If an Olympian can refuse to quit when everything tells her to stop… maybe I can keep going through finals week.
The real shift happened on the “Holding on, letting go” panel.
Kim Holderness and Gretchen Rubin talked about the “empty nest.”
I stopped what I was doing to think about it.
I never really considered what it felt like for my parents to send me to UT Austin. I get so consumed by essays, sports, and social obligations that I forget they exist as individuals with their own emotional states. I assume they are just… there. Watching Life360 in the background, probably worried, definitely loving.
They aren’t okay? Maybe.
They’re going through a massive life transition while I’m busy stressing about a mid-term.
Anxiety isn’t a generational silo.
It’s a human condition.
The conference ended and I didn’t feel “cured.”
I didn’t leave with a five-year plan.
I left feeling like it’s okay that I don’t have everything sorted. The people up there had forged paths that looked messy, broken, and then whole. There is comfort in not knowing. Maybe I just need to stop waiting for certainty before I start living.
