The funny thing about missing out is that you can never know what it is exactly that you missed. Even if you ask around, we all experience life differently. Other people’s reality wouldn’t have been, couldn’t have been yours. So the first thing I want to make clear is that of all people’s, my perspective on the transition from high school to college is the one that you should probably least be able to trust.

Because I did the reverse of taking a gap year: I skipped my last year of high school. At some point over the summer going into my sophomore year (Year 11) I realized that I didn’t much like the schooling I was getting and did seem to like the idea of going to Oxford. And through studying a year early for the standardized exams Oxford requires American applicants to have completed, I was able to make it out of my meatgrinder-esque institution of a high school. In June, once the school year was over, I was a high school dropout and headed to university.

They say you regret the things you don’t do the most – with the implication being that given a choice between two actions, one is the “doing” action and the other is the “not doing” action. I think that is a ridiculous proposition. For one, it’s obviously not true. Whichever branch of the fork in the road you choose, you never get to go down the other one. And it is this idea, I believe, that makes the fear of missing out such an influential one.

Not only have you missed some event in the past, you’ve precluded from yourself the future you would have had had you just done differently. If I had just been there at the party, she would have kissed me and not him and we would be together now and not them. But also: if I had just stayed home, I would have aced that test and gotten that scholarship I needed. We talk a lot of win-win situations: situations in which both outcomes are good ones in absolute terms. But isn’t one always relatively better than the other? And, therefore, when we don’t get, haven’t we actually lost?

So the question of how things – my transition to college, my overall happiness, my personal and intellectual maturity – would have been if I hadn’t skipped a step in the traditional path is one I can’t help but grapple with. Not that I think I have had a bad transition, or am unhappy, or am outside the normal bounds of adolescent self-mastery. I am also fairly confident that had I stayed in high school, that year would have been a bad one. First, I perceived the very structure of secondary education to be oppressive – with its seven hours a day of sedentarily listening to nearly useless material, followed by hours of homework. Coupling that with the fact that I would have had to worry about the stress of college acceptance for up to 14 months longer than I did – well, here seems to clearly beat there.

But what if that extra year, even if it were of misery, meant that my transition wasn’t just fine or good, but great; that the build-up of anticipation eliminated the uneasiness which characterized my first term’s happiness; that I had wrinkled out some of those insecurities that constrained my character? After all, a year is a long time – I know how much I personally changed in 2015. And while there are two other 17-year olds at Balliol, and I’m sure plenty across the university, a much larger proportion of first years are actually 19, which is why I raised the gap year as a point of contrast earlier. You take one so that you can have a year for yourself; in doing the opposite, you lose a year in which you are becoming yourself.

Of course, the question of “what if?”, which is essentially what I’m on about, is not answerable. And since it isn’t, I’m never going to have the experience of having gone down the other fork in the road to compare to the experience of the chemin I did choose. Practically speaking, I have all the evidence I’m ever going to have and should be able to justify my decision off of it. So in one way, I have no regrets about my choice: I am happy at Oxford and can only see myself becoming happier. Coming was the right thing to do.

And maybe it is a waste of time to get yourself trapped in a maze of right/wrong, should’ve done/did, either/or dichotomies. Agonizing about an unchangeable past seems silly, and one might at this point remember Sylvia Plath’s fig tree and argue that being too caught up on “what if?” also paralyzes your forward motion.

But on the other hand, reflection about the structure that your life could have had seems to me just as valuable as being able to forget. It might be paralyzing, but it is also honest—and the idea that you should just keep moving, while productive, lets you elide admitting to yourself your missteps. Neither commends itself over the other; whether you remember or forget is no more than a matter of whether you are the type to remember or the type to forget.

Sister. It’s their sister. Don’t get too excited, folks. This may sound like the beginning of some deservedly cheap erotic novel but unfortunately it is not quite as excitingly Freudian as that. His sister was in my year. We were both 16. I was comfortable knowing only this about her and nothing else, but we were forced into association through dissatisfying circumstance. We were in the same biology class, but I desperately avoided trying to speak to her. She was not exactly what one would call normal. She would always sit in the back making small paper voodoo dolls out of the pages of her notebook and read/write fan fiction on her laptop. Naturally, this didn’t make the other members of the class like her any more. She did her thing on the back row, and we did our thing…avoiding her on the back row.

A boy, her older brother, had asked me to come to his birthday party. To a 16-year-old, this was an offer that just couldn’t be refused. He was 18, and the idea of older boys at a party was too exciting to decline.The cute little mole near his lower lip was a surprisingly attractive feature to a younger girl. The opportunity of merely being close to an older guy stimulated my romantic imagination enough to tempt me into accepting an invitation. But his sister was much more excited than any of us were. She ended up inviting most of our year group to come and observe all of her brother’s hot friends in action. Sadly,we had all been a bit repressed and the opportunity to view the male sex in their natural environment was far too inviting for us to resist. 

So at this party, this endearingly mole-faced boy began to kiss me in the hallway. As our lips locked, I looked up, not to find Cupid with his bow and arrow, but his sister filming the moment on a camera. But she wasn’t using her phone to film. She was using the family video camera. I knew because it was the same one my dad used to film my fifth birthday. It was the kind of camera that flips open on the side, and it had a piece of tape on it with their family last name. The kind you’d associate with happy family memories of opening Christmas presents or riding a bike solo for the first time. No doubt, when his whole family is sitting around on his 21st birthday and decides to whip out the old family video camera to look at some old, vintage, cinematic moments, they’ll find me, sucking the lips off their son. For some reason I feel his sister made 15 copies of it and keeps them buried in different areas in case the house burns down.

I had no desire to become such a hugely noticeable part of family history. As I prised my face off of his and stared into the abyss-like lens of the video-camera, I caught a deeply horrifying glimpse into my own future. I immediately worried that this video would be some tame version of a Kim Kardashian sex-tape, following me around for the rest of my life and prevent- ing people from ever taking me seriously. The reality of what would happen was much, much worse.

As if these video-camera shenanigans weren’t disturbing enough, arriving at school the following Monday, I was ambushed by his sister’s joyful shout. “Now we’re sisters!”, she shrieked to the everyone within hearing dis- tance. She declared our new relationship status to the entire common room. Since we were now practically kin, she would walk me to class, clutching my arm with a vice grip, and wait for me at the school gates at the end of the day. She even invited me on their family holiday. The endearing mole boy and I had only kissed once and had never gone on a date. 

The only thing she seemed more interested in than our relationship was Justin Bieber. I seemed to have somehow gained the world’s worst sister-in law, and we hadn’t even been on our first date yet. I knew that were I to date mole boy, the situation would just keep getting worse and worse. Would she hide under the bed and film us during all our make-out sessions?

Would she keep photos of us in a locket under her pillow and look at it every night before bed? With these images in mind, when the date finally came, I took it upon myself to end everything with him halfway through the dinner. When he asked me what had gone wrong, I proceeded to abort all further attempts at conversation and take a very long trip to the toilets in which I rang through all the recent callers on my phone asking for advice. Every- one told me to eat the rest of my meal as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there. I did handle everything with him pretty poorly, I confess, but I console myself that it wouldn’t have worked out anyway. It turns out that his decision to play tonsil hockey with me may have been a very convincing attempt at appearing to be a heterosexual male. By his next birthday party, he was in a relationship with my ex-boyfriend. If we had ended up going out, I think it’s more than likely that he would have ending the relationship saying, ‘It’s not her, it’s her vagina’. 

0th week: collections, essays, my period. The ideal sexual atmosphere, non? Ah, well let me prove you wrong, dear reader, with some quite surprising facts. The return to uni has been a long-awaited one for me, especially with the prospect of a new partner awaiting me back at college. Oh, the things we were going to do! The positions we were going to try! The toys we were going to give their inaugural whirl! Never did I expect so many hurdles be- tween me and the satisfaction of my libidinous appetite. But then again, the course of kinky sex never did run smooth; although usually for the better. For alas, the hallowed dawn of Collections descended upon Oxford, completely bypassed by the lucky few (such as I) with a tutor who finds exams “pointless, darling, pointless.” So, as I burst into my boyfriend’s room, zealously clutching the suspenders that had just arrived in my pigeon-hole (discreetly packaged, I may add. No luck for the porters on that day) I find him there, the vision of studiousness at its most bleak. Seven hours of exams plus countless hours of revising really cuts off all that desire you manage to build up over an especially dry vac. Who knew Ovid could be such a turn-off?

Unsultry studying wasn’t the only cramp on my 0th week sextravaganza. Another time-bomb ticks ominously in the background: ding ding! It turned out that from Monday I would be surfing the crimson wave, or indeed shagging the Red Baron. It was now or never. Now you may think, why not just have period sex? There’s nothing wrong with two open-minded people accepting the other for their body’s natural processes? I assure you he thinks the same, and I quote: “As long as you don’t mind me skipping 3rd base”. However, as a girl who has never been with a man who was not in the least disgusted by even a bit of hair down there, this is a tough one to approach. There are so many questions.

Will this be the most un-arousing experience of my life? What will we tell the scouts? How much do I love those BHS bedsheets? But then again, after hearing stories of blood spattered walls and Carrie-like sexperiences, I decided to give it a safe thumbs down. But my man was so obvi- ously in need of rescuing from revision-induced stress, how could I possibly be so cold-hearted not to lend him a very eager hand? The thing is, I wanted to give him quite a bit more than just a hand. Luckily, collections hadn’t quite crossed the boundary into being his WHOLE life this week. That’s right, boys and girls, I managed to steal a night with my boy. Take that, Latin grammar, you’re not the only one who looks good spread across a desk! Sure there were a few hiccups after such a long time apart. The highlights include a mysteriously disappear- ing bottle of lube (yet to be found. Updates to follow) and a quick bedraggled trip to our local Welfare Officer – never mistakenly leave your condoms in your room when interviewees are about. Damn those pesky kids. But despite the ups and the downs of wetting that long ol’ dry spell, I never was one to miss out on a few explosions. When the going gets tough, the tough get foreplaying 

I like to think I’m a reasonable guy, patient, kind. I always try to see the best in people. But you are one of the most disgusting, putrid humans I have ever had the misfortune to meet. The mere thought of you forces me into doing breathing exercises just so that so I can prevent chunks of my body from splat- tering the room after having exploded from pure anger.

Overall, I’d say I am quite annoyed at you. But you probably don’t remember why – hell, you probably have no idea who I am. But let me explain. It was last term, and I was sitting in the library, slowly giving up on my essay and my hopes of sleeping that evening. In the last hour, I had written one hundred words, read one page of a book and broken down in tears 12 separate times. Really, it was just an average Tuesday night. But I nonetheless per- severed, hoping desperately to get the essay finished on time, and hoping that I would be able to sleep before my tutorial the next day. And so obviously I did none of that and went to Hassan’s. And here, my friend, is where you come in. Because as I joined the back of the queue, you stumbled in, very obviously drunk, after what I assumed was a good night at Lola Lo’s. You decided to just waltz in front of me, with no regard of the system of queuing whatsoever.

‘This cannot stand’ I thought. You were not merely pushing in front of me, ruining my night and forcing me to wait for my chips, but you were potentially ruining my entire life. Maybe if I had been faster with getting my food, rather than waiting for you to take a whole minute to decide on what sauce you wanted in your chicken wrap (mayonnaise, a frankly disappointing choice after you spent so much time pondering the various options) I would have got back to my essay sooner. Maybe I would have written a better essay. And who knows what would have happened then!

My life could be monumentally better if you had just obeyed convention. In fact, your blatant refusal to queue is not only an insult to me, but to everyone. Our country is based on queuing: people queue for everything, from the train to the shops. We would be nowhere without it.

But no, instead you decided to push in front of me, disobeying convention, throwing caution to the wind. But it’s okay – you were drunk, right? We’re all silly when drunk. We all make mistakes, wake up in bed next to strangers, road signs or the occasional puddle of our own making.

But that’s fine, that doesn’t affect ME. I don’t care if you make a mistake. I only care that I get my chips.