You're Packing for College and Your Stomach Is in Knots. First Time or Not.

There's a shower-caddy on your floor and a list somewhere of things you're supposed to buy. The countdown is real now — move-in is weeks, maybe days, away. And instead of the excitement everyone keeps assuming you feel, there's a knot in your stomach that won't loosen.

Maybe this is the first time you'll really live away from home, and you can't picture yourself actually doing it. Or maybe you've done a year already, it didn't go the way you hoped, and now you're packing to walk back into the place that has the receipts. Either way — this is for you.

The story you're telling yourself right now

Your feed is wall-to-wall move-in photos and "best four years of my life." Everyone looks thrilled. So the quiet conclusion assembles itself fast: everyone else is excited and I'm just scared — what is wrong with me?

I work with young women in exactly this stretch, the last weeks before they go, and I'll tell you what I tell them: being scared before a change this big is not a malfunction. It's a reasonable response to a genuinely huge thing. The people posting the happy photos are mostly scared too. They're just not posting that part.

Why leaving home hits an anxious, neurodivergent brain so hard

Here's the mechanical piece nobody explains. Home has been doing an enormous amount of quiet work for you — a family who notices when you're off, a routine you didn't have to invent, a place to fall apart safely, people who catch the details you drop. Leaving means all of that support disappears at once, on the same day, and gets replaced with "figure it out."

If you've never had to run your own life — feed yourself, get yourself to sleep, get yourself to the 9 a.m. with no one waking you — that's not a small adjustment. It's a whole set of skills you're expected to already have and were never actually taught.

If you're going back after a hard year

And if last year was rough, you're carrying something extra: evidence. Maybe the grades slid. Maybe you were lonely in a way you didn't tell anyone. Maybe you weren't eating or sleeping right and it caught up with you. Now you're afraid you're walking straight back into the same wall.

I want to be careful with you here, because this is the part that matters most: last year going badly was not proof that you can't do this. It was proof that you did it with no support built for the way your brain actually works. That's a completely different problem, and it's one you can set up differently this time — but only if you look at it honestly instead of just gritting your teeth and hoping this year is magically easier.

What the fear is really about

Underneath the packing anxiety, the fear usually isn't the dorm or the roommate. It's what if I fall apart and everyone finds out I couldn't handle it. You're bracing to be exposed. And so, before you've even arrived, the story is already forming: something's wrong with me, and college is where it'll finally show.

It won't. But the way to make sure of that isn't willpower — it's setting up support before you go, not after the crash.

What actually helps — before move-in

The move that changes the year is getting help in place now, while it's still just knots in your stomach and not yet a crisis in October.

That looks like naming the specific fears out loud — is it the loneliness, the schoolwork, running your own day, being far from home? — because a named fear is smaller than a vague dread. If you're a returner, it looks like getting honest about what actually went sideways last year — the lost structure, the not-sleeping, the impulsive choices, the isolation you hid — so you can build for that instead of white-knuckling it again. And it looks like having someone in your corner who isn't a roommate or a parent, so the hard weeks have somewhere to go.

Because I work remotely across California, this can come with you — same support whether you're two hours from home or ten, before you leave and through the semester.

If this is you

I'm Jessie Lamb, a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor working remotely with anxious and neurodivergent young women across California. The weeks before move-in — the fear you're not supposed to be feeling, the dread of going back — are one of the most common times young women reach out.

If the knot in your stomach sounds familiar, reach out before you go. You're not the only one who's scared, and setting up support now is what makes this year different from the last one. You don't have to do it alone.

This post is educational and isn't a substitute for individual mental health care or a diagnosis. If you're in crisis or thinking about self-harm, call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) any time, day or night.