Titles:

• If you're going through a rough college season, Watch this
• College unfolds in seasons of super and suck
• How to gracefully make a big college transition

Thumbnails:

• Cosmo floating on the left through a wintery forest very confused with a backpack on. There's no life. It's kind of dark. And in the distance at the right of the screen there's a sunny opening with green spring life.

I'm going through the most exciting and terrifying period of any season.

A few days ago, I sat at my cherry wood writing desk and felt the truth in my bones: Something needs to change, but I don't yet know what or how. It's been almost a year since I graduated from Cornell, ten months of working remotely at my new job, and 7 months since my ex and I broke up. My days pass in a misty haze of writing articles, talking to friends, and creating gamification designs for work. I used to love it all. But right now I feel an intruder wearing the activities of my old self like a rain battered coat.

It's not depression or apathy. It's walking through the last snowfall before spring, the wet socks, the grey light, the mud underneath that's almost warm, and wondering why it's taking a god damn millennia.

A book which is helping me tremendously during this period is Resurface by Cassidy Krug.

Throughout the book, Cassidy unveils her own story of relinquishing a fruitful Olympic Diving career, for well, she didn't know what. She interviews hundreds of people and charts the hidden patterns behind life seasons.

I started reading the book after a particularly tumultuous two days apartment searching in Boston. Every five minutes my entire life trajectory warped like a runaway train switching tracks. This apartment has a bathtub, I'm staying in Boston forever. This apartment costs more than a heart donation, I'm fleeing the country.

I needed something to ground me in what the fuck was going on.

The most important insight I learned from the book is transitioning between seasons is normal and good.

When you don't appreciate the seasonality of life, being stuck can seem like it will last forever. But there's always a bridge from winter to spring. You just need to learn how to walk it.

You might be going through a difficult college season like changing a major, applying for internships, or letting go of a friend. If so, this article will help you:

• Reflect on what type of season you're going through
• Learn how to treat yourself with grace and love as you go through it
• Arm you with the tools for navigating any season

It begins by understanding the seasonality of life, and how we transition between them.

Life Is A Series Of Chapters & Seasons We Transition Between

Seasons & Chapters

Wanna hear my life story? In my childhood I went through a chapter of video game bliss and ignorance. This shifted into relentless grade hunting and health maxing in Junior year of high school as Covid hit. As I came to Cornell I entered a chapter of content creation and solopreneurship before finally coming to the spiritual, gamification, and meta-learning obsessed 5'10 Dutch man you know and love today.

In many ways, my life, like all of ours has been a series of chapters and seasons I transitioned between. By chapter, I mean a period of life connected by some theme. It could be work, relationships, or becoming mildly obsessed with Conscious College content (I personally recommend this last one). Seasons are the individual parts of a chapter, and transitions are the movements between one season or chapter to another.

I like to think of chapters as made from four seasons. I think they'll seem vaguely familiar to you if you've ever walked outside:

• Winter: We're not really sure what the next season of our life should be and waiting for it to come. A low energy state.
• Spring: We've discovered what the next chapter is and are actively working toward it even if there aren't major results yet. A high energy state.
• Summer: We're at the peak of the chapter, the fruits of your labor shining through more than you could imagine. A manic state.
• Fall: We've become restless and bored with the chapter we're in, knowing something must change but scared of making it happen. Low energy state.

The first instinct I had upon learning these four seasons was to chart myself like a good boy. But seasons don't work for the film industry; they don't have clean beginning, middle, and ends. Just looking at my last year, I've gone through every single one of the seasons above, at both minor and major scales.

If I were to put myself somewhere though, I'd say I'm in a chapter of career exploration and in the transition between winter to spring. I'm beginning to realize the change I want and working towards it. Right now, the most likely scenario is moving to The Netherlands and doing a year long masters in education science and technology. This decision was made after five hours of hyperfixating with Claude at 1 AM, ye know, as you do (check out my AI College Rusting article here).

The value in the season metaphor is not in plotting ourselves exactly at a season in each chapter of our life. It's building awareness for roughly where we are, what each season requires to prosper. Here's what each needs:

• Winter: Time and energy devoted to reflection and contemplation. Don't rush yourself. Winter can only end so quickly. But don't be too passive either. Experience things so you can seed new ideas.
• Spring: Patience and grace. You won't find fruits in any worthwhile thing right away. Don't drown the springs plants by showering them with buckets of water.
• Summer: Appreciation and vigor. You've made it. Really appreciate how far you've come, stopping to admire every fruit and flower. But don't become complacent just because some people respect you. It doesn't translate to all areas of life.
• Fall: Accept all good things must come to an end. It's scary to think of moving on, of your leaves changing color and falling off for the winter, but keeping yourself stuck in the past will only make things worse. Accept the beauty of ends, and revel in the yellows, oranges, and reds which come in your leaves transition.

For me, this means giving myself patience and grace while reflecting and contemplating on the next season. A part of me just wants to go, go, go. But I know rash decisions, especially as big as moving countries can lead to problems.

I encourage you to reflect on what chapter of life you're in right now, and what season you feel you're at with it. Sit with it. Embody the insight. The awareness alone will be extremely helpful for the next insight. Then you're ready to move to what's next. Most students can understand the principle of seasons. What's harder, is moving through transitions.

Transitions

Transitions are the shift between seasons and chapters of life. We don't have a good language for transitions or cultural skills for navigating them. They're much more ineffable than chapters and seasons. Without awareness, they become the silent current shaping our lives. Let's get a better understanding for what they are and how we can navigate them.

In Resurface, Cassidy breaks down transitions into four types:

• Anticipatory: You know a transition is coming (college graduation).
• Non-anticipatory: You didn't know a transition was coming until it was flung on you (surprise break up).
• Non-event: The transition comes from something not happening (no return job interview).
• Sleeper: The transition happens but you aren't aware of it until afterward (spiralling into party mania).

Some transitions are rivers, swaying back and forth between calm and rapids. Learning to love myself while single has been particularly resonant with this idea. I gave my soul to that relationship. When it ended, it felt like a part of me had been raked, and not in the good clearing leaves of the porch kind of way.

For six months, I entered a chapter of spiritual awakening which included some of the most tranquil, jubilant moments of my life. Wow, I navigated it so well!

But then, I noticed the same over giving tendencies from my relationship coming into my job through free work, weekend calls, and accepting just one more responsibility. I realized staying in Ithaca for seven months was just me hoping my ex and I would get back together again. I could have left, but made excuses like "I have so many friends in Ithaca," and "I need to wait out my lease" (there's a magical thing called subletting).

Strangely, being such an autonomous and doing oriented person led me to realize the sleeper transition I was in less. Doing so much every day in Conscious College, my work, clubs, and more made me feel I was doing all I needed to make change. But I wasn't really. I was running on a treadmill, only to step off and realize I was still playing into the same identity (I write more about how our shadows keep us stuck without us knowing here).

Learning the language of transitions helped me realize the shift from my spiritual chapter to my career exploration chapter. And now that I'm aware, I'm overwhelmed. The problem is not I don't have things I'm passionate about. I have too many things! I want a successful spiritual business. I want a profound romantic relationship. I want to write a book. I want to help create a college system that is more knowledgeable, loving, and conscious.

This morning, I opened the draft of this article to begin rough drafting, before changing to my planning doc for moving to The Netherlands.

Where do I start?!

The uncertainty and stress over navigating the transition gave me my final and perhaps most important insight regarding seasons.

Why Is Transitioning Between Chapters And Seasons So Stressful?

Here's what nobody tells us about transitions: we're not just changing circumstances. We're dying.

Not physically, obviously, but the self that navigated the last chapter. When we leave a chapter behind, we're not just leaving a job or a city or a relationship. We're leaving the person who made sense inside that container. I'm not just leaving Ithaca. I'm leaving the version of me who walked to Collegetown Bagels every Saturday morning, who had a spiritual awakening in the gorges, who knew exactly which friends to call when the evening got heavy. That self had a world. It was small and familiar and it fit.

The new self doesn't fit yet.

This is why transitions feel like so much more than logistics. Choosing a new major isn't just picking different classes. It's admitting the person who chose the first major was working from a chapter that no longer holds. Ending a friendship isn't just spending less time together. It's releasing a version of yourself that needed that person to feel whole. We grieve these selves the way we grieve people, because in a very real sense, they are people. They just happen to be us.

I've been grieving the spiritual chapter I had in Ithaca for months now. Not the spirituality itself; that stays. But the specific flavor of it, the late night journaling sessions where everything clicked, the walks where the trees seemed to breathe with me, the feeling that I had finally figured out the shape of my life. That shape is dissolving. I'll build another one, probably in a Dutch city where everyone towers over me and rides bicycles with an elegance I will never possess. But this one has to be honored before the next one can begin.

Healthy transitioning requires healthy grieving.

We're not taught this. College culture especially loves the clean pivot: new semester, new you. But pivots without grief create shadows. The old self doesn't vanish just because we stopped acknowledging it. It lingers in our habits, our reactions, the way we accidentally recreate the same dynamics in new environments. I caught myself doing it when I brought my over-giving patterns from my relationship straight into my job. Same tendency, different recipient. The self I thought I'd left behind had packed itself in my suitcase without asking.

So what do we do in the middle of a transition when the old self is fading and the new one hasn't arrived?

We ground in what we know is true regardless of chapter. Not the specific activities or relationships or goals, because those change. The deeper stuff. The values that feel like bedrock no matter what season we're standing in. For me that's spirituality, playing the infinite game, zest for learning, and the stubborn belief that college can be something more than a career pipeline. Those don't belong to any single chapter. They belong to every chapter. They're the roots that stay when the leaves change.

And we lean on the people who see us across chapters. My mom, who casually dropped the Netherlands idea like she was suggesting a new restaurant and not a transcontinental life change. The friends who knew me before this chapter and will know me after it. These people are the through-line. They remind us that the self doing the transitioning is not the same as the self being transitioned from.

I don't know where I'll be in five months. But I know the version of me typing this, cross-legged on my bed in Ithaca with a cold cup of coffee is doing exactly what this season asks. Sitting in the mud. Trusting the warmth underneath.

If you're in a transition too, whether it's a major change, a relationship shift, or something you can't even name yet, I hope this gives you a little more patience with the mess of it. You're not lost, you're between college seasons. We don't walk neatly from winter to spring. We stumble, we backtrack, we stand in the slush wondering if we imagined the warmth.

But the seasons keep turning. They always do.

And somewhere ahead of us, a version of ourselves we haven't met yet is already smiling. Probably taller, if the Dutch have anything to do with it.

If you found this post interesting you would love my free College Freshman Cosmic Journaling Kit (CJK). ✨📚

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