Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Study at a Far University

1. To meet new people. If you've lived enough years in a city, you'll soon find it closing in on you. You've been in every unpopular café, every unknown staircase, every hidden corner, but there's always a friend of a friend, a third cousin, a childhood neighbor, waving at you. You want to get out of this maze where instead of running to a dead-end you encounter the same old faces. Maybe you just want to remind yourself that the world is big, that there are places in the world who haven't met the likes of you yet. And what better way to do that than move to a university that’s hours away from home.

2. To explore the new you. Okay, maybe it's not meeting the same people that you're tired of. It's meeting the same you. Waking up to the same morning routines, same weird habits, same toxic patterns. Over and over again. 24/7. Like Sisyphus, but instead of a boulder, the burden you're rolling up on a mountain is yourself. But you can be different. Really, you can. You can walk through those university gates entering as a new person. You'll dye your hair a color you never thought of. Shave your head even. Get a tattoo – it doesn't matter. Only that it's not the same heaviness you're carrying uphill. You're building for yourself a new type of burden, but hey, at least it's new.

3. To cut people off. Remember that one friend who flirted with every boy you've ever liked but you've never found a proper opening to cut her off? Move to a miles-away university, where you can say you've been too hung up on college life to check up on her or reply to her texts. What can she say? You guys are three bus stops away now, so there's no way of her knowing that you're just making up an excuse so you could officially eliminate her from your life like cutting crusts off a pizza (screw pizza crusts!). Funny how bonds and distances are positively correlational. The more years you've been through with someone, the greater the distance you'll need to blur the friendship.

4. To find peace. You've removed your toxic hometown, toxic self, and toxic friends, and now you wake up to new sunlight, new air, and especially, new journeys. You believe in destiny. You believe that somewhere out there stands a new version of you who is dying to take hold of your sad old life. Maybe they're sitting at a café. Maybe it's like a scavenger hunt, where pieces of this new self are hidden in mysterious locations. X marks the spot! Beneath it is a treasure full of new beginnings.

5. To find answers. Some questions come about in one place, and its solutions arise in another. Why am I so angry all the time? What can I do to stop being so angry all the time? Where did all this anger come from anyway? What if I decided to turn my life upside down, would that help with anything? You'll never know. Not until you file your application form, pass the exam, and head for university that's miles away from everything you've ever known.

But life, in its old-fashioned way, will kick your butt in the way only life could. Wrestling with life is almost like a boxing tournament, only that if you're knocked down, life doesn't count to ten seconds until paramedics come to get you. You can't tap out of life's difficulties either. When you lose the match, and life wins, again, and when the show is over and the lights are all turned off and everyone left, you still find yourself in the ring. It's been more than ten seconds but no one comes to pull you out and wipe the sweat off your temples. You can come up with five reasons why moving to a far university is a good idea but life comes up with ten reasons why you're wrong. Meeting new people pushed you to feel more alone than you've ever felt. You don't make a new you, you end up looking at the mirror and feeling completely aside yourself. Because you can't just change your hair color then expect you'll turn into a brand-new human being. You're still pushing up the same old burden, you've just found a new angle to look at. You roll over your new bed and reach for a familiar kind of emptiness. On a side note, cutting people off from your life is NOT like cutting crusts off pizzas, it's like losing a body part because of diabetes. Amputation sucks but so does diabetes. So.

And there's no peace in being confused. There's no new version buried beneath foreign ground. What lies waiting instead is the plain, outdated, boring, predictable, uninspiring who-you've-always-been. But guess what, that who-you've-always-been is the one who carried you throughout all those years. And out of all the reasons you invented, the only one you got right was the last. You asked, you sought, and there's your answer. You may hate it, but an answer's an answer. So you walk out of those university gates. Life K.O.'ed you hard, but it left you with just enough strength to stand up, reach your hand out, and hail a bus home.