When Did My Life Get Out Of My Control?

From Todaycollegetour

Hi Dr. Sullivan. Thanks for letting me see you today. I just really need to talk to someone. I feel like when I tell my friends about my problems, they don’t listen. I am just having a lot of trouble this week in school… well it’s actually been about six months of trouble.
At the beginning my freshman year, I moved onto a floor with a hall full of guys. I was so excited to be living on campus to experience having my own space. I was so pumped to have a roommate. I didn’t think anything could go wrong with my new living situation. However, after the first couple of months of living with these other guys, I started to feel the after effects.
August, September, and October were amazing. We all got along fine, and their lifestyle of drinking and smoking pot was exciting and exhilarating to me. Everything was so new and exciting, and I never seemed to be bored. I thought living the care free life was the life for me. Nothing else seemed to matter except doing things that felt good to me at that time. We probably went out four or five times a week, whether we had homework or not. After a few months, I started to realize that what I was doing was not making me happy.

First off, our room and hall is so loud. I can’t even sleep at night because everybody is up yelling and banging on doors and walls past two in the morning. Luckily we have a cleaning staff because our hall gets trashed pretty much every night and I don’t even want to walk through it. I started to just stay in my friends’ rooms because I dread going back since I can’t relax there. I shouldn’t have to put up with this, right?

Also, I am doing horrible in school, even though achieving good grades and making highest honors was always something I took pride in, in the past. Going out every night was fun for awhile but not when you see the consequences. I am almost disappointed in myself. I can do so much better. I would be so embarrassed if my parents or friends back home saw what I was doing. How am I going to go anywhere in life like this? I am not going to be able to do anything with my life anymore! There is a point where you can’t make up for some of the things you have done.
Also, going out so much makes me tired all the time, and it doesn’t help that I can’t sleep well at night because I can always hear my roommate and his girlfriend having sex. I’m too tired to do homework, I’m too tired to hang out with my girlfriend, and I’m too tired to work out, which is something I used to love to do. AND! Since I’m too tired to do anything else most of the time, I never have time to write anymore. Along with getting good grades, writing always made me feel better about myself. It was something I did for me and just me. I was doing something productive and something that let me release anything that was going on in my life. But I can’t just stop going out because I would feel like I was letting down my roommates. They would give me a hard time and wouldn’t let me live it down. And who wants to be the loner at home by themselves? It is so hard not to give in to peer pressure when you have all these guys constantly urging you to do something.

Everything is so disorganized in my life. This is not what I wanted out of my college experience. My goals have seemed to vanish. I am always so drunk that I won’t even remember the good times. I have blacked out five times in the last two weeks. I thought that was normal until I talked to my cousin about it. And even though I go out with my roommates all the time, they are not what I consider friends. They would never stand up for me, they rarely watch out for me, and they are definitely not people I look up to. The other day I asked one of my roommates for relationship advice (I have no idea why I would ask him). My girlfriend and I were in a fight because I had not called her in a few days. My roommate told me to just sleep with someone else because, well, its college and when else are we going to have an opportunity like this again? I was shocked that he could just think like this. These are the types of people I am surrounding myself with. Have I become like this?

I feel like I have lacked in other important relationships in my life due to my self-centered lifestyle. I am not even a mirror image of who I used to be. I don’t even look like what I used to.... I look.....hardened. I hardly talk to my mom and dad anymore. I feel like I have no one....I just feel like I am heading down the wrong path and I don’t know how to stop. What should I do? Can I do anything? Is it too late to change my ways?