Dear 19-year-old me,

I understand that your freshman year was pretty rough and you had a lot of thoughts about transferring. As you enter your sophomore year, you're going to meet a new friend that will convince you to not transfer after all, and your life will feel like it's going your way for the first time in your life. You will feel your mental health getting much better and everything else in your life feeling much more at ease. With that being said, I would like to say to you that you need to be extremely careful.

You may feel like your life is going your way, but that will not be the case for long once you realize that your new friend is not really a good friend at all. They're going to pressure you into doing things you don't want to do and then turn that against you, saying that it's your fault. You're going to believe that it was your fault until you get the chance to talk to several therapists about it and all of them confirm that it's not. And I want to confirm with you that it was never your fault.

You're going to feel loved and appreciated for who you are, and you're going to feel like you can be yourself and not have to hide who you are for the first time. You felt like your mental health was drastically improving and you could grow as a person. This is where you should be the most careful. I understand that your lack of friends have made you attached to everyone who has shown any affection towards you, but it's going to affect you in negative ways in the long run.

You have so much to live for, along with so many opportunities coming your way, to be honest, maybe those opportunities would not have happened if you didn't become friends in the first, place, but what I'm trying to say is to not obsess. Obsessing is the worst thing you can do and will end up negatively affecting your mental health. You're going to spend endless nights crying yourself to sleep because someone made you think that you were worth something, but ended up thinking that you were unbearable after all, just like everyone else who has destroyed your self-esteem.

I'm not saying that you should automatically stop trusting anyone. You will find lots of new friends throughout the rest of your college career and will still have many opportunities coming your way. What I am saying is that obsessing over someone that shows you any kind of love will end up affecting you and your mental health negatively. There will be many people out there that will say that they are on your side and are your friend, but they will only be saying that to make themselves look better and not look like a bad guy. You are so much more than that.