What To Do If You Have the Worst First Day of School in the History of the World

The first day of school always starts off with such potential. You get on the bus full of exuberance and waffles, your backpack full of shiny new school supplies and also waffles, for emergencies. Your binder has an intricate color-coding system, which will certainly help with something at some point. This will be the best year ever! Yay!

Within five minutes you have somehow managed to fail calculus. By lunch, your secret crush has mistaken you for a janitor of the opposite gender. The end of the day finds you sitting in the principal's office, fighting back tears as you explain that you didn't mean to eat your dissectable biology frog; it just flew in your mouth when you toppled backwards over your desk, and there is certainly no need to involve the school psychologist.

We've all been there, though some of us seem to spend more time there than others. Here are a few ways to bounce back from a truly catastrophic first day.

Panic
Deteriorate into a blubbering wreck. The whole year is ruined and you might as well just drop out and enroll at that creepy fake Hogwarts you saw advertised on the wall of a public bathroom. Everything is gross and life is a butt and—

Stop Panicking
Okay, now stop it. Take a deep breath. Breathing is important, and you are unlikely to improve your day without it. Visualize your goals. For the sake of your mood, visualize easily-achievable goals. ("Get home without being hit by bus. Eat donut.") See? You are already a huge success.

Make Ridiculous Plans
Once you've calmed yourself down, go ahead and fantasize about absurd long-term goals, to make your current misery seem less miserable. What if you moved to the Amazon and became a well-regarded snake psychologist? People would come from around the world to hear your snake theses, and one day you and another snakeologist would meet each other's gazes over the prone form of a depressed snake, and it would be love at first sight. You would go on adventures, and your dashing colleague would one day share his dark secret, which is that he actually does not care for snakes.

Do Something Physical
After a magnificently terrible day, it would be great to just lean back and say "Brain! Endorphins, please!" and have your brain say "Beep boop! Sure thing, boss!" and flood your system with feelings of contentment and well-being. Unfortunately, your brain is basically an idiot, and talking to it will only get nervous-looking employees to ask you to please leave the Starbucks. But what you can try is physical exercise, which to your brain is like a nice cup of tea, except the tea is morphine.

Literally anything aerobic will have this effect, no matter how stupid. So if Tron-jitsu,for example, is the only thing that motivates you, then go for it. When you are approached at the park and asked why you are flailing around, out of breath and wearing an electronic leotard, cheerfully explain "Oh no, it's okay, I am just trying to make brain morphine."

Do Something Nice
Once you have been released from police custody, resolve to do something nice for someone you don't even know. Teens who do altruistic stuff like volunteering both feel better about themselves and tend to be more socially adept, so there you go: two reasons not to act like a grouch. Just start winging freshly-baked cupcakes out your window at total strangers, and you will instantly become more popular and attractive. "Hey, is that a new kid?" people will ask, rubbing their eyes in disbelief as you pass. "No, that's the kid who ate a frog," others will clarify. "Eww," everyone will conclude.

Cut Your Losses
If nothing else works, then at least rest assured that your day can't get any worse while you're asleep, unless you've got bedbugs or ghosts, in which case we are not equipped to help you. Otherwise, just crawl into bed with a whole cheesecake and go to sleep. When you wake up, the sun will be shining, the birds will be going "HELLO OTHER BIRDS," and the day will be a brand new day, one in which you have not yet had a specific kind of falling down in public named after you. And if you screw that day up, there's always one after that, and if there's not, we will all have more pressing concerns than the fact that you managed to lock yourself in a bathroom stall.

What's the worst thing that ever happened to you on a first day?

Related post: Send Us Your First Day of School Pics!