Long commutes
In my university cohort, I was kind of known as that one student who had the long commute. I mean, long commute. It was 2 hours each way, potentially 3 hours on the ride home if I got stuck in the traffic and trains were delayed. A couple of times it was 4 hours. I would be walking that 10,000 steps a day, I'd be waking up at the ass crack of dawn, I would be coming home at midnight sometimes.
One thing that kind of irked me about telling people of my daily public transportation plight was the inevitable comment of "Oh, I could never do that." from some well-meaning friends. When my people in my class graduated high school, it was a decision that everyone had to make. You either do the commute for university, or you don't go to university at all. When I got the acceptance letter to the most prestigious university in my state, it was a decision that I had to make. I either am prepared and ecstatic to commit to that commute, or I don't do the degree and I find some other career aspiration. I wanted to be a veterinarian so badly, so I committed to that commute. I romanticized it. I played songs on my headphones. I did the daily wordle. Like a lot of students, I tried to do some studying on the train before inevitably accepting defeat because you would have to download the course content and the notes and the readings before the commute. Considering you might have 30 minutes of uninterrupted commute time, you might as well just do the readings at home at that point. So I did the commute through my bachelors. 2 days a week, 3 days a week wasn't too bad. You do a couple of pracs or lectures in person. You do the rest online. You deal with the lecturers who make the passive aggressive comments about the students who didn't bother to show up in person to class - despite having to wake up at 5am that morning to make it to your only class of the day at 8:30am. In doing so, you didn't feel any better than any of the students, you just feel tired. You felt disenfranchised that you had to run to catch 3 trams and 2 buses and a train that morning, while another student rolls out of bed at 8am and gets to class. That same student goes home to sleep and then attend their 3pm class before heading out for a shift at work in the evening. That student did nothing wrong - they are struggling as much as you are - but there is some sort of resentment that slowly builds and doesn't leave. So you go on to do some further education. You want to get experience to get into a field of work after all. So, you commit to that, and suddenly your lab or your class in just a bit further away from campus. It extends your commute from 1.5 hours to 2 hours. You go to a lecture in the morning, a meeting straight afterword. Lab work for a few hours before another meeting. But that time it's 3pm. You know that if you head home now, you'll get back at 5pm, plus you'll miss the commuters. But, you have more work to do. You work for an hour or two, and suddenly it's 5pm. You head home. The train is cancelled. It takes 3 hours. You're home at 9pm. This is what it takes to get a degree. It is this, or nothing. But how is it fair that your friend has an apartment in the city that they don't pay for with a job they don't have, while you are spending 5 days a week in this hectic schedule, and the other 2 days working? You are barely passing, while they are succeeding easily? They are able to take on more responsibility in the lab, they join clubs and societies, and they spend their free time volunteering. They hang out with friends, they go out at night, they sleep in, they watch shows and read books.
And so when someone says they could never do this , there is a little bug at the back of my brain that has been nagging me for years. It says "It is this or nothing. It is this or living and dying in my town of 3,000 people, still poor. I do not get to choose whether I waste 4 hours of my day or not. And so faced with that decision, you would choose the same, because the alternative is missing out on your dreams and your aspirations."
