The vision board that hangs crookedly on my dorm wall has seen its fair share of wear and tear. Its corners are wrinkled from traveling cross-country in my backpack. A little too heavy for its tape, from time to time the vision board falls off the cinder blocks, and I wake up to it facedown on my windowsill. The twenty-five pictures collaged across it—representing my resolutions and aspirations for the year—are beginning to peel at the corners, as if they’re trying to leap away from the glittery cardstock I hastily glued them to.

I made it alongside three of my best friends at a sleepover during winter break, all of us hunched over our own piles of paper on a tiny kitchen table until 2 a.m. It’s been months, but I still remember the way the hours blurred and melted together as we talked about boys and parties and aspirations and dreams—the past and the future. “2025 will be my year,” we said about a hundred times. We all pasted our own lofty goals onto our boards, which now reside in our individual dorms, scattered from coast to coast.

For every New Year’s resolution I’ve ever kept, there’s ten more that I’ve failed. And unsurprisingly, I’m not doing particularly well this year either. I present a mostly-comprehensive, almost-completely-tragic breakdown of the goals that illustrate my wall this semester.

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In elementary and middle school, I spent much of my free time tearing through book after book. I stumbled under the weight of my tote bags every time I left the library, loaded down with Roald Dahl and Rick Riordan. I was on a first-name basis with the woman at the front desk.

But when I hit high school and instantly waded knee-deep into homework, I virtually stopped reading for fun. The only books I cracked open throughout junior year were Moby Dick and Walden—required reading for AP Lang during which every lecture bored me out of my mind.

So over winter break, I set a goal to read outside of class with purpose and intent this year. For three weeks at home, I was relatively successful. I devoured Pachinko by Min Jin Lee in three days. After receiving a copy for my 17th birthday, I finally picked up Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar’s This Is How You Lose the Time War and made similarly quick work of it. I even got through several hundred pages of Evicted by Matthew Desmond before I had to return to Providence.

But since the semester started, I’ve only been reading for my Shakespeare class, and I can barely even keep up with that. “There’s something in the air here,” I tell my friends jokingly, something that seems to physically prevent me from opening Othello or A Midsummer Night’s Dream more than three hours before class begins. Hopefully some week soon, I’ll manage to wean myself off of SparkNotes summaries: but it’s certainly not this one.

Study more and get good grades

I’ll practice some radical honesty here. My transcript from last semester was less than satisfactory. More than any other resolution, my vision board is peppered with Pinterest pictures of girls studying in cute cafes and pictures of red A+’s stamped across papers.

As difficult as it’s been to keep up with this particular goal, I’ve been doing my very best. And even though not everything gets done perfectly ahead of time, everything does get done. My Notion board is up-to-date, my backpack is full, and my newly-acquired iPad is open to Goodnotes nearly 24/7. After a first semester focused on socializing and settling in, I’m making a conscious effort to improve my focus and self-discipline over these next few months—to develop sustainable study habits that will hopefully carry me through the rest of my time here.

Maybe more importantly, I’m also trying to let go of the idea that perfect grades are absolutely vital in the first place. I put a lot of pressure on myself in high school to do well on every single assignment in every single class, and while it did get me here, I spent far more time stressing out over unnecessary work than I should have.

I’m still striving to do well, of course, but I’m making a conscious effort to rework my perspective and to understand that B’s and C’s are not the end of everything as I know it. It’s probably inevitable that I’ll fail a test, or two, or even three. The snow keeps melting. The world keeps turning.

Go to the gym

To be perfectly candid, I haven’t been to the gym once this semester. A series of slight misfortunes has befallen me—a bad cold, a sprained ankle—but honestly, my biggest obstacle has been myself and my unwillingness to trek through the snow to the Nelson. There’s not much more I can say about that.

Spend time with friends

Pictures of people hiking, going to the beach, and playing board games take up a good deal of my board: they represent the idea of the healthy, social, balanced life I’ve spent many a nights dreaming of. Before I entered college, I imagined long weekend trips up to Portland, Maine, where we’d rent an oceanside cabin and spend hours sunbathing in the waves. Or nights of cooking in apartment kitchens; we’d whip up multiple-course meals and have mature, adult dinners.

Now, when I look back on those daydreams, I genuinely can’t help but laugh. High school me had no idea what was coming. Instead of airy and beautiful apartments, my roommate and I spot silverfish scuttling along the corners of our dorm floors and walls. Instead of the sparkling New England coastline, my friends and I make pit stops in the SciLi lobby to shake the gray snow off our boots before they get soaked through. Instead of hiking into forests and across rivers during my downtime, I’m hunched over lecture captures in the basement of the Rock.

My college life is nothing as glamorous or sophisticated as I imagined it might be. The half-dozen Pinterest boards I’ve accrued throughout the years are a far cry from the messiness of my Google Calendar and the newfound hubbub of young adult existence. Still, though, I’m glad to be enduring freezing temperatures and hours of homework and dorm hall pests alongside the people I’ve grown to love. There’s no one else I’d rather be living this aggressively non-Pinterest-friendly, messy, beautiful life with.

Be grateful

After the reprieve of winter break and weeks spent lazing around at home, the first month back at school has been nothing short of a whirlwind. There’s always an assignment to be doing, a club meeting to attend, a deadline to set six reminders for. It’s beyond easy to feel overwhelmed.

The other day, two exams deep into midterm season, I caught myself saying, “I hate this school.” But the moment I stopped to actually think, I immediately regretted that declaration. Sure, my schedule is rigorous, and classes are demanding. But in the grand scheme of things, the me from two years ago would have sold her kidney to be here. Even if I’ve got three club meetings lined up back to back in one day, they’re all clubs that I genuinely care about; even if I’m drowning in work, it’s work for the subjects I wrote my very college application about.

I must admit that this last resolution is sort of a cheat; no pictures symbolizing gratitude actually appear on my vision board. But perhaps it’s the one that I care about the most. “2025 is my year,” I find myself repeating, day after day. Sometimes the declaration is joyous and satisfied; sometimes it’s a phrase at the end of a long week that I force myself to say until I start believing it again.

And at the end of the day, I always do. I’m grateful for the clear gold sunlight and the warm weather we’ve all been enjoying this week—no matter how much New Englanders tell me that “second winter” will hit again soon. I’m grateful for Blue Room booth tables and the photo strips that paper my dorm wall and the second floor of Rhode Island Hall. 

Mostly though, through the hours and hours of studying and working, I’m grateful for the people I sit with. We procrastinate our readings and slip on the ice outside and go out on the weekends and then we do it all over again. This life is imperfect in almost every measure. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.