You know Homecoming is approaching when September turns into October and the talk of dresses and photos and parties grows louder. You feel like you should be excited and even bouncing off the walls, but instead you feel stressed and unprepared. 

Of course no dress fits you in the way it’s supposed to, why would it? In fact, you may not even have a dress at all.

The worst thing about it is that it isn’t even really worth it; all the money and the time and the unnecessary amounts of anxiety and self-doubt isn’t worth the 20 minutes you’ll spend in the SC fieldhouse. 

Finding a dress is way harder than it looks and way harder than it should be. You don’t want to be basic but you also don’t want to be too much. You also actually want to like your dress, so what happens when every single one you pick is out of stock or won’t arrive on time? You ransack the mall just to end up scrambling the week before to settle on something that you “kinda like.” Ending up with a dress you don’t truly love makes it harder to feel comfortable and confident, it just adds another thing to be conscious of. 

One of the biggest aspects of homecoming is finding a date. Who am I going with? Who should I go with? Why does everyone in the world have a date except me? These are the questions that everyone is asking themselves leading up to the anticipated night. Constantly seeing Snapchat stories of videos and photos of people getting asked isn’t confidence boosting at all. Most of the time, it leaves feelings of embarrassment and just plain disappointment. 

Even when you have a date, Homecoming is still stressful. Whose house should I go to to take pictures? Do I choose their friends or mine? It’s especially hard when friend groups “don’t mix.” In the end, the best and easiest option seems to be to just split up and meet up after, which basically defeats the whole purpose of going with a date. 

And yet, it doesn’t stop there. 

What about after? The unrelenting pressure to find an after-party is extremely frustrating. What if you just want to relax? Or watch a movie? It’s so time and thought consuming even though it doesn’t really matter. What’s wrong with just going to a restaurant with your friends, or simply just going home (which I’m sure that everyone is begging for by the end of it all)? It may seem boring, but honestly it’s probably better for the sake of keeping your sanity. 

The purpose of Homecoming is to have fun with your friends, enjoy taking pictures, and to just live in the moment. Instead, it’s almost the opposite; there’s drama and stress and never enough time. Homecoming should be fun, but most of the time it isn’t. It just creates more hassle and chaos. By the end of the night the exhaustion sets in and you realize you didn’t even actually have fun.