WHEN I FINALLY WENT to therapy, we ended up talking a lot about my third year of college. It’s one of those things that you wouldn’t anticipate at first, but it ends up making so much sense you can’t believe you didn’t see it coming. One of therapy’s little treats, I guess: noticing your own stupidity, and its impact throughout your life. It was fall semester when I started replacing lunch with coffee, spring semester when I realized I was doing it.
And I thought I was going to be a doctor.
By the time my thirties started, I had begun to regard forgetting to eat meals as symptomatic of a wide array of clinical disorders, but when I was twenty-one, I considered it a mere side effect: of bad dining hall food that I had been eating for far too long, of having no money to buy my own groceries, of wanting to be skinny but having no free time to exercise, of having a limited mental capacity for things that weren’t related to my major, of being pre-med in general, of the anxiety of knowing that I was three years into school for something I did not truly want to do, and that the only way to get out of said thing was to admit this fact to my parents. One of my biggest accomplishments at the time was that I had made it so far into school without taking Adderall, so I figured my dependence on sugar and caffeine
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Charlotte Diel is a junior at the University of Alabama studying English. A finalist for the Greer Marechal Memorial Prize in Fiction, she has been passionate about storytelling from a young age. When she's not reading or writing, Diel enjoys travel, daydreaming, and drinking coffee. This is her debut story.