Fall Fears

By this time next week, the letter asking Hartwick to allow me back as a student for the fall semester will have been sent. With that comes multitudes of emotions-the principal of which are joy and fear.
I know I have not written about what happened that made me leave the school of my dreams in January, and don't hold your breath for a post about that. You'll die. Those of you who know me well know what happened and those of you who don't, well, have fun speculating.

The joys thinking about returning to school brings me fill me with bubbles. Yes, bubbles. I feel like fizzy soda, which is a sharp contrast to how I have felt lately. Without Hartwick, I feel like I just brushed my teeth and then drank orange juice which I proceed to spill. But the next week or two of not knowing, I think, will result in me doing my hamster impression. The equations are quite simple, really:

and 

but

A quick thanks to Jenna Lowry for assuring me the ± meant what I thought it means.

See? that's not too hard is it? It can't be; I (mostly) figured it out and I didn't even finish Algebra 2/Trig (usually second [but sometimes third] year of high school math)
The proofs behind the first two are so easy, I won't do them. But allow me to explain the third equation. That's what this whole post is about!

First, there are the fears that all people in my place would have regardless of major.

1. Will my friends have replaced me in my social group?
2. It's not my first year, so I'm not a freshman, but I also don't have the academic credits to be a sophmore. What does that make me? A freshmore? That sounds like a bad brand of deodorant. A sophman? No, that's not good either; it makes me sound like a guy who can't get it up. There is a poll to the left-should I say Sophman or Freshmore when people ask what year I am? Vote :3 <3
3. Do people think I died? Are they gonna look at me like I'm a ghost? In my defence, this has happened to me before. After I came back from a month and half of being in a hospital in 2011, some of the people in my school actually thought I had killed myself. Yes, I killed myself and there was no funeral or anything. True story, bro.
4. Does everyone know what happened? Are all the returning students gonna think I'm psycho or something? Were there rumours after I left?
5. What to do if people ask what happened and I don't want to tell them. Well, that's not a worry. I'm going to tell people that I went travelling with the Doctor and he messed up the return date.

Then, there are the questions unique to being a psychology major:

1. Will my peers in the major try to analyse what happened to me?
2. I declared my psych major at the end of the fall 2012 term, and haven't taken the basic level psych classes (psych 110 and 111) yet. What will my peers think of a [enter class name here] in their freshman level psych class?

Lastly, (and my biggest concern) there are worries unique to the theatre arts major.

1. When I left, I had to drop out of the play. Am I ever going to get cast in a mainstage again, or will the directors worry that I'll have to leave again?
2. I failed my Intro to Theatre class last fall (a fluke) and wasn't there to take it in the fall, so I will probably be taking it this fall, and last time I checked the department head was teaching the class this time. Will he judge me? I don't want to mess up what is pretty much my first impression with him.
3. In jTerm, I gave my all to the class I was in. I wanted to prove to people that I am serious about being in theatre and the like. I fear that may have been my last chance to show that I'm not a joke and I may have ruined it.

~Conclusion~

Many of these may sound irrational, and maybe they are but, they are real and legitimate concerns I have. They may all revolve around what other people think of me, but let's face it: no matter how much we may say that we don't care what everyone else thinks of us, it does change the way we think of ourselves and our cognition in general. I had a high-level idea of how things were going to be when I came to Hartwick last fall, because no one knew really anything about me. But now I may be about to enter an environment where my reputation proceeds me, and that reputation may be based on he-said-she-said things that went around seven and a half months ago. It may be true that I can't wait to prove my rep wrong, but what if I prove it right not even knowing it. I really have no idea at all what lies ahead of me, and that scares me more than AMC's The Walking Dead, which really scared me. But it probably was not the best idea to watch it at night home alone in a large-ish house right before bed. At least I had the lights on.