Boarding school TikToks always find a way to infiltrate my “For You” page. These aesthetic videos usually include fast-paced montages of picturesque hallways, gourmet meals, decorated dorm rooms, and often end with clips of students doing homework in the library to prove to the audience that they really are at school.
The comment sections on these videos are filled with questions, people expressing jealousy or hatred, and, more than anything else, Gilmore Girls comparisons. While I sometimes create my own aesthetic TikToks glamorizing Choate, I am not Rory Gilmore and neither are the rest of the students here.
These TikToks portray life at boarding school as some sort of movie, and — don’t get me wrong — I know that sometimes it is. Every time you step in the dining hall, you are awed by the mahogany walls and sky-high ceilings, and, at Convocation, our teachers dress up in robes, like… what?
But these small clips are far from fully encompassing of the life I am living: the late nights studying — and crying — over math quizzes, buying myself a coffee after every chemistry class thinking it will help me get over not knowing what the heck an isotope is, and the early mornings when I roll out of bed and wish that I hadn’t. So, when I see a TikTok trying to “relate” to my boarding school experience, I am tempted to click the “not interested” button. Sometimes, I feel like I will never live up to the unrealistic ideals of these videos showing the problem-free, perfectly-balanced days.
The thing is, the picture-perfect 15 seconds of footage conceals much of the truth. Even my own TikTok videos conveniently show only my bed and not my destroyed carpet, littered with clothes because my dresser drawers seem to only fit two shirts. The fact that my feet knock over the items on my desk every night and my organized study space falls apart into a pile of junk is always just outside of the camera frame.
Do you know what else the 15 seconds don’t show? They don’t show the most incredible moments: laughing in the rain as you run to Wallingford Pizza House 30 minutes before curfew, staying up too late talking to friends with giggles filling the conversational gaps, making culinary creations in the dining hall trying to see what you can come up with because you have had a gyro one too many times.
These moments are way more fulfilling than any TikTok video could ever possibly capture. So, I urge you to stop comparing yourself to others and to focus on the life you have created — not the one that TikTok has made you think is expected of you.
