A Letter to My Senior Year Self

It was not until coming home after completing my freshmen year of college that I truly realized the profound effect the past ten months have made on my life. Without realizing it I embarked on a journey of self-realization and am slowly discovering who I am as a person. Yes, I have matured, but more importantly I am revealing my likes and dislikes and shaping the person I am going to be for the rest of my life. Although this is scary, I have never felt more connected to myself.

The summer after my senior year I really struggled with the idea of leaving for college. Everything was perfect in my life. I had the best friends I could ask for and more importantly a supportive family. I was angered at the fact that life was going to change and for no reason at all. Why couldn’t I experience the happiness I was feeling right now forever? Looking back at the person I was a year ago, I can’t help but laugh at my naiveté. Yes my life was going to change, but I had no idea at how much my life was going to change for the better.

My first month of college was a whirlwind of emotions. I was five and a half hours away from everything I knew for seventeen years. I was comfortable at home. Now, I was at a school with 26,000 unfamiliar faces. 26,000 people who each had a new story to share. 26,000 people who could offer me the world. Yet, I didn’t see it that way. I was homesick.

I would not change anything about my first month at school because it forced me to grow up. I realized that this was life. Things change and that’s the way it is. I needed to deal with it. I needed to learn to live on my own and stop holding onto the past. I was trying to relive memories of days that were far gone instead of creating new memories. That is the worst thing someone can do. Not just in college, but in life because living in the past holds one back from living. Just simply living. Putting your happiness in the past and in the future is no way to go through life.

The day I realized this goes down as one of the best days in my life because that was the day that I started to find true happiness. I never realized how much I felt held back in high school until I started to do things for myself in college. So, I can confidently say the greatest lesson my freshmen year taught me is to live life for yourself. Not in a selfish way. Kindness towards others goes a long way. Yet, it is imperative to find things that make you happy and pursue that with everything you have in you. I learned if I can’t make myself happy then there’s no way I could make others happy.  

I slowly stopped caring what others thought about me and stopped holding back who I was. If someone didn’t like me for who I was then they were entitled to their opinion, but I wouldn’t compromise who I was to make someone else happy. Not anymore. You can’t please everyone. I showed myself for who I was and found people who accepted me for me. No one else. That is the greatest gift I could have received.

The past year has opened my mind to new people and new experiences. Each day is an opportunity. An opportunity to meet someone who can change your life forever. An opportunity for you yourself to change your life forever. Regardless, it is so important to be open-minded because you never know what each day will bring. I found myself looking for people with different views then mine and learning and growing from them, but never compromising my own beliefs to fit in. People who change themselves for others lack self-confidence and fear individuality. That concept alone saddens me.

I can’t count the amount of mistakes I made the past year and if I could that would have been my biggest mistake. I learned from the mistakes I made and grew from it.

The past year taught me to be bold. To be daring. I have so much to offer and the world has so much to receive. I learned to be ambitious and to dream big. I learned that when people say it’s the little things that matter they are telling the truth. I learned that sometimes you need to just stop what you’re doing and dance (Thanks Emma). I learned that happiness is a choice. I learned to stop thinking and to just do it.

I look back at my senior year self. The girl who feared the world and I smile. Somewhere in the past ten months I became myself and the world became my playing field. I am only eighteen years old and I have so much life to live, so many laughs to laugh, smiles to smile, tears to cry and emotions to be felt. I have the world to see, people to meet, lives to change. My senior year self would look at who I am today and probably see a different person, but I believe she would say you’ve done pretty damn well, but you still have so much more to do.