It's really hard for me to feel sorry for people who were the last of their classmates to turn 21:

People with fall birthdays are usually the ones who have this experience as they usually turn 18 their freshman year and 21 their senior year. My birthday is at the end of September, which means that I, too, would've had this experience had things gone smoothly for me; only they didn't. A few weeks into my freshman year, I dropped out of college due to anxiety. I went back the following fall as an almost-19-year-old freshman. When I turned 21 at the beginning of my junior year, one of my roommates said to me, "Lucky you. I don't turn 21 for another year." I remember thinking to myself, "Lucky? Lucky that I had to drop out of college? Lucky that I'm going to have to watch all my friends from high school graduate college before me?"

The other night, I was talking to a family friend who has a 20-year-old son who just started his senior year of college. I asked how he was doing and they said, "He's really unhappy right now. Most of his friends can go out to bars and he can't." I had to stop myself from responding with "Would he rather have my experience?"

These are just a couple of examples. Across various internet forums, I've seen countless people acting like victims because they couldn't go bar-hopping until midway through their senior year. But what they don't seem to realize is that this is only because they had a straight clean path, as opposed to the messy crooked path I had; a path that being the first of my friends to turn 21 wasn't worth. It's almost as if they're saying they wish they had had to drop out of college. Would these people really rather have the experience I did?