I’m on a train home from North Carolina and I feel empty. The window flicks past in a blur of gray and gold, like a film reel of someone else’s life.

I just visited a school I have dreamed of going to since I was a child. I spent a weekend with my favorite people, tucked into the crooks and intricacies of Ninth St. shaded by Duke’s architecture. I love this place, I remind myself. I could have a life here, I try. My college application blinks back at me, unconvinced. 

This is the reality of an October in senior year. I send my condolences to my fellow survivors.

Scroll your way through Instagram or TikTok, and you can see our generation’s college application process in real time: acceptance reactions, polished essays, kids who make juggling every activity look easy. In theory, it should inspire us. But, in practice, it’s enough to make even the best student feel inadequate. Every viral post is a reminder: You’re not enough, or at least, you’re not doing enough. 

Now, staring into the blank white voids of our Common App activities section, many of us don’t feel proud. We joined clubs freshman year, noticing how shiny the names would look on a resume. We pursued leadership positions, imagining that they would set us apart. And when asked why — why we did it, why it mattered, why that school is right for us — our brains are empty.

It’s strange, realizing that all the things that once felt like achievements now look like evidence of our own overextension. All those hopes and dreams we clung to for security bend and break under the weight of reality. 

When the application is finished — the supplementals are written, the forms filled out — there is a temptation to rush ahead. Just submit it, you tell yourself. Don’t check it over. Even if it’s the school you have dreamed about since childhood. Just make it stop hanging over you. Just be done. Hit the big blue button. Watch the little burst of confetti rain down the screen. Feel something. But you don’t. Not pride, not relief. It’s a strange kind of dislocation: wanting out more than you want in, running toward something not because it pulls you, but because it pushes you away from what’s behind you.

This process is isolating by design: each essay confidential, each test score a secret. Each decision lives in private, all in some blind hope that when the inevitable happens and a rejection comes, your world won’t crumble under everyone’s disappointment. The people closest to you feel far away, their faces blurred by the exhaustion and comparisons you can’t help but make. 

When the system pits us against each other, it’s easy to keep our struggles silent, to act like we have it together even as we unravel. But the truth is, none of us are alone. Our peers are walking this same road. Maybe if we dared to look away from our stress for a moment, we’d see that we are more connected in this struggle than we realize.

And even if you haven’t “done it all” — gotten the 4.0, written the research paper, started the nonprofit — you are not a sum of your accomplishments. You still deserve a future. No admissions influencer can take that humanity from you. 

The train keeps moving. The skyline fades to suburbs, then fields, then home. Maybe that’s the point: this in-between is temporary. The exhaustion, the comparison, the strange grief of growing up — it’s all part of leaving one place and not yet being in another. Maybe we don’t have to rush to fill the emptiness this process leaves behind. Maybe it’s enough just to sit in it — to admit that this part kind of sucks, that the waiting feels endless, that we’re scared to want something that might not want us back. 

Somewhere between what’s ending and what’s next, there’s this stillness that asks nothing of us but reflection. The first step is naming it: the burnout, the disillusionment, the numbness. Maybe the next step is forgiving ourselves for feeling it. After all, we’ve been sprinting for years. No wonder we’re tired at the finish line.