Freshman year can be rough. Everyone experiences some form of severe discomfort during this first baby step towards adulthood. My big hurdle happened to come pretty early on.

I awoke the third day of Orientation after my first night of debauchery at a frat party. I felt a wonderful mixture of discoordination and comfortable grogginess. College was going to be sweet.

I decided to load up my new coffee maker and then I headed to the shower. Avoiding Starbucks with home brewing was just one of many failed money saving techniques I’d try freshman year. The instructions said to use two tablespoons of roast. I didn’t know it at the time, but the provided spoon was already two tablespoons. So when I loaded two heaping spoonfuls into the device, I was in fact putting in five tablespoons. I was also unaware that the package of roast used was actually a finely ground mixture of select coffee beans commonly referred to as espresso.

Two hours later, I had downed an entire large thermos of this liquid gold, and stopped by the library café for a power bar. College students need fuel, and who had time for lunch?

An hour after that, I waved goodbye to my parents, and headed towards Clark Hall to meet my academic advisor for the first time. That’s when it started. My heartbeat accelerated, and my mind began to race. My thoughts grew so loud that I began talking to myself aloud compulsively. And then I was aware of the fact that I was talking to myself, and I began to think I was going crazy.

Too. Much. Coffee.

I remember that first meeting with my advisor vividly. I sat there, trying with so much effort to suppress the shit-show going on inside my brain, convinced I was turning schizophrenic, while my advisor calmly worked his way through the half hour of sage advice he had probably been repeating, on loop, all morning: A.P. scores, class schedule, Add-Drop, my pounding heart, rapidly spiraling out of control while my subconscious slowly engulfed my helpless mind.

The evening was spent in the dormitory, while my floormates watched in amusement as I pounded down water bottle after water bottle, making frequent trips to the bathroom. Someone mentioned water poisoning, and the danger of losing electrolytes. In a moment’s time I was back from Bear Nasties with a giant case of Gatorade.

Oh the trials of a paranoid mind …

At one point I began to suspect my next door neighbor Peirce of poisoning me. He mentioned he was a chem major. The next morning, after never falling asleep, I convinced myself the frat brothers from the other night had spiked the “Grey Goose,” and my poor R.A. drove me to Gannett at 7 a.m. for a slew of blood tests and an EKG scan. I asked the doctor if I was going crazy.

“Sometimes going to college creates anxiety. These things spiral out of control.” There’s nothing more un-American than doctors telling you it’s all in your head. Naturally, I didn’t believe him.

This episode began an entire semester of insomnia where I would average less than two hours of sleep a night.

Room 3601 of Clara Dickson Hall is the best dorm room on campus. I mean it. It’s a spacious corner single with two colonial-style windows giving you both a southern and western exposure. In the golden afternoon, you’re afforded views of the entire Dickson Courtyard, Balch Hall and Court-Kay-Bauer. And for reasons unknown to even the top theoretical physicists of our time, three-six Dickson is always the coolest group of freshmen on campus.

But for an insomniac at four in the morning, these amazing views of campus mock you, as the lighted windows around the quad give you an exact head count of who else is awake right now (most common answer: no one). At first, the lighted staircases and bathroom windows give you a naïve impression of an army of fellow insomniacs. But once you’ve realized this flaw in your analysis, and have memorized where these windows occur, you’ve realized that you are, in fact, quite alone.

If you believe the doctor’s snowballing explanation, as I now do, you won’t be surprised to learn that insomnia is often the product of a highly unstable positive feedback cycle. You lie in bed, hoping to go to sleep. You begin thinking about how long this is taking you. You continue thinking, growing more and more worried. Soon, the thoughts consume you as your mind races through a list of all your various shortcomings and deficiencies. A little psychoanalyst in the back of your mind begins to tell you that lack of sleep could lead to all sorts of medical repercussions. All these thoughts lead you to stay awake, and the cycle repeats.

But I wouldn’t realize this logic until a month later, when I headed home for Fall break. After a classic homemade family dinner, I went to my own, familiar bed, in my own room, at my own house, and still I couldn’t sleep.

And that’s when it hit me. This problem wasn’t about going away to school, or being in a new environment or even OD-ing on coffee — though it certainly helped get things rolling. This problem was the realization that soon I was going to be on my own: making my own decisions and facing my own consequences. And the problems I would face couldn’t be cured by a visit to the doctor, or a phone call to my mother. I was the only person I could turn to. This was something I needed to fix, and not with Nyquil (though Nyquil does work in a pinch).

And fix them, I might have. Actually I’m still not sure if it was my willingness to turn my attention away from such a silly illness as “insomnia,” or the fact the final exams finally gave my overzealous brain something big to focus its attention on. I guess the most comforting part about going away to college is you can always count on a heavy workload to distract you from the more enigmatic problems in life. Anyways, welcome to Cornell freshman! Goodnight, and good luck.