I've been noticing a little trend going on around me. It's subtle, but just clear enough to make it out. My frat has a cold. Now, this cold isn't affecting everybody in my frat, but definitely the people that I surround myself with. These people haven't got any clear symptoms either. They aren't coughing or sneezing. This cold is far worse, and takes a little more time to get over I suppose.

If my life were a book, I probably would have come to the end of a chapter. It's a chapter at the relative beginning of the book so there is still a lot of character analysis. We are still finding a lot out about our "hero" in his quest. The reason I say that it's the end of a chapter is because a whole lot of shit has happened, and a whole lot of shit is changing, and changing fast, swiftly, and keeps you asking, "what is to come." I think the book is a thriller.

While there is great change occurring to me, it is also occurring to my best friends. We are all going through some sweeping change in our social lives and collectively we have had to let go some of our best friends, because they are studying abroad this semester. Change is a very stressful thing, and that common change coupled with the fact that we're all dealing with change personally makes for a lot of change and an enormous amount of stress along with that.

This is why my frat has a cold. I learned in an intro psych class that families, whether they appear to be the most dysfunctional family or the most normal family, are shaken up in the event that one player in the family starts acting differently. Take for instance a nice suburban family. Their son, lets call him Josh, suddenly starts failing out of school. This will throw the family into disarray, because one of the role players is going through problems.

It is the same I feel with my friends. We are in some sense a family. We all had a "family member" (our friends studying abroad) leave our lives. This has affected the remaining members, because we seem lost, notice how things are different, and other unwanted feelings that you spend all day trying to avoid. Further, we have had other "family members" (personal situations) mess with us. We're just a bunch of dysfunctional frat boys right about now. Last semester seemed so care free, so easy, and now it's all complicated.

I asked my friends what we used to talk about last semester, because these situations are to some degree affecting us all a little bit, and we discuss it quite a bit. While it isn't desirable to have all of these stressors in your life, you find a great deal of solace knowing that the people around you feel similarly and have issues too.

But, like all colds, they're eventually wiped out. I feel the same way about this situation. Take a little Tylenol, sleep it off for a while, and before you know it, you're back out there doing the damn thing. This is the end of a chapter, perhaps. But it sure isn't the end of the book, and oh, oh what surprises are to come!

This post was originally written by Tyrone Schiff
University of Michigan · Organizational Studies · 08 Jan 2007