Bro… Please Don’t Worry About Me

By Emily Sorkin

I had skipped my morning Prozac one December morning before college admissions came out. This was a different December for me, it was the last December I would fully spend at home before moving to university, wherever it would be. I applied to New York University for Early Decision I, knowing I could no longer stand small states and even smaller towns. I was set to find out if New York would be the city I called home for four years on December 15th. On December 12th, after eating three bowls of Gigi Hadid’s pasta and distracting myself from what would possibly, no, MOST LIKELY define the rest of my life, I began to crumble under the weight of my erratic expectations for myself and finally gave in and did the unthinkable– I made a “chance me.” 

For those who might have never experienced hair-pulling-school-related anxiety before, a “chance me” is something done during the darkest and deepest black holes of one’s adolescence by putting your sanity and self-esteem into the hands of strangers and incels online (a.k.a. people who are not on the board of admissions) who judge your grades, extracurriculars, demographics, and scores to determine if everything combined is good enough to get you into the college of your dreams. Though the concept is flawed and unrealistic, comfort comes from an unbiased voice of support who will write “Looks great! I think you are a shoo-in.” I had never dabbled in online forums before, my Mom didn’t even let me watch YouTube videos until I was 13, but I knew instinctively not go to Reddit where dreams go to die. Instead, after some digging, I found College Confidential, a safer and more pompous Reddit where overly anxious students went to comfort and judge other overly anxious 17 to 18-year-olds. 

College Confidential, whose tagline states “The Real Deal on Applying to College,” is composed of forums divided by university name. To my surprise, NYU’s forum amassed over 1,700 posts; most of which were written and replied to by the same 30 people. But between the point of my Mom confiscating my computer due to nearly breaking my thumbs refreshing the forum and me recalculating my freshman to senior year GPA, a brave College Confidential Confidante (a phrase I just coined) offered to create an Instagram groupchat for greater accessibility to new comrades. Despite having reservations about the dangers of Reddit, I had little hesitation in distributing my Instagram handle, must have been due to my somewhat underdeveloped frontal lobe (fingers crossed it fully develops soon!!). 

In this exclusive group chat, test scores were swapped, essays were read and friendships were formed… kinda. To say that the group chat in its entirety had become besties is a stretch. Still, there were four of us who began to talk outside of the digital walls and started to develop an internet friendship that only grew stronger after our combined acceptances. 

From December to our August move-in, we regularly stayed in touch, creating shared NYC-inspired Pinterest boards and FaceTiming into unholy hours of the night, careful not to wake our parents. The four of us even did something unheard of — we met IRL during freshman year “Welcome Week” and remained friends, I thought that only happened on TikTok! We bickered and fought and possibly drifted just a tiny bit as we tried to beat the homesickness and the harsh realities of college math classes but a gravitational pull kept us together until we couldn’t remember what it was like to live without each other. We survived exile, the death of loved ones, Phebe’s, first loves, heartbreak, Poco after we “matured” from Phebe’s, countless ER trips, and miraculously held each other close through a different lifeboat – an iMessage group chat titled “bro dw about me,” named after an unfortunate knee-skinning incident during a disastrous Poco run. 

We added a new member to our squad of four, now five, an honorary ex-College Confidential Confidante, but still proudly boast to strangers about how we came together almost four years ago, wearing it as a badge of honor while cautioning that our anxieties are under far more control than they were when we were wannabe angsty teenagers. 

As we enter our senior years as angsty 20-something-year-olds, I can’t help but wish there was a Post-Graduation Confidential where I could ask for a “chance us” for our fates after our four years of college inevitably come to an end. We have plans now that differ from the simple-minded ones we had four years ago; someone from the original Instagram group chat just got accepted into a Master’s program! I feel like that nervous eighteen-year-old all over again when I think about what will happen once we hang up our ugly purple graduation gowns and if we’ll lose each other to quarter-life crises and city changes. 

My friends regularly joke that I’m sappy and too sensitive (this can be proven through my writing an essay about our friendship) but I hope that just this once they can excuse it and let me take them to the ER once again for an eyeliner-related injury. In the words of Charlotte York, from one of my favorite shows “Sex and the City,” I hope they accept my proposition that “we could be each other’s soulmates”.