High school. Four years of moderate freedom. Eight semesters of busy work mixed with late night cramming for tests in AP classes that you thought, at the time, were some the most difficult bridges you would ever cross.

Here are four huge things I believed to be true in high school, completely debunked in my first year of college.

1. I thought AP English my junior year was the hardest class ever, like the hardest curriculum on the planet. I complained every chance I could about the class and the reading and what I thought to be “unfair” grading. Turns out, I just sucked at writing with rhetorical correctness for a while. An 8-10 page paper was assigned and worked on over a period of about five months. I remember meticulously writing paragraph by paragraph, outlining topic sentences and color-coding thesis statements with “textual evidence” by highlighter. Oh, was I so very wrong. What I once labeled the greatest feat of my young life turned to dust rather quickly. I found myself running back to Strunk and White’s "The Elements of Style," praying it would give me the grammatical answer I was seeking. I prayed to have that curriculum back when we started reading Shakespeare after Wordsworth after Poe after Homer after all the incredible, yet diverse and sometimes incredibly confusing authors, poets and playwrights. That same 8-10 page paper doesn’t get mentioned after the first day of class on the syllabus. There is no time for color-coding thesis statements with different highlighters because those highlighters are too expensive.
2. I thought the number of friends you had meant everything. If I had the opportunity to exhaust myself both physically and emotionally for the sake of becoming “best friends” with as many people as possible, I would have done it in a heartbeat. I valued surface level friends because of their quantity over true depth of friendship. I wish so badly that I could go back to myself before high school started and preach this falsehood to myself. I wish I could have spent less time jumping around from friend group to friend group based off of popularity or selfishness. I wish I could have poured into my soul friends. Those people that understood me deeply on a level that others did not. Whether there were two of them or 15, I just wish I could have done that. When I got to college, I was disappointed frequently by my high school friendships. I held high expectations for people that I thought truly cared about me when they did not. And I am 100 percent positive that I let other people down as well. The more friends the merrier. I just consistently pray that I am able to dig deep and plant relationships in college that I can water, ones that sunlight and the love of Jesus can aid in growth. That’s what means the most. Not the number of friends, but the caliber of those friends.
3. I thought long distance relationships were bound to fail. I guess I am living proof of this falsehood. I had this image of two people dating in high school. The quarterback and the cheerleader who dated all four years of high school and broke up the summer before they went their separate ways because of whatever reason. I imagined long distance being too trying and not worth the “effort.” I always told my 14-year-old self that if I ever had a boyfriend in high school, I would break up with him before I went to college. My senior year, I quickly realized I had spoken too soon. I found myself falling for this dreamy guy who was clearly too good for me. Somehow he must have felt the same way and we ended up together. There was never a doubt in either of our minds whether we would stay together or not. So, come August, I went off to Alabama and he boarded a plane to Connecticut. Over 1,000 miles. We succeeded once and we’re going to keep at it!
4. I thought I would go off to college and never get homesick. Yeah, I was wrong. I was fine for a solid chunk of time, but then I got my first sinus infection and grieved the fact that my mom wasn’t sitting in the waiting room with me. I wished so badly that my dad was a few miles away when I got a flat tire or my debit card got compromised. Home can be tough. Home can stir up hurt that we hate revisiting. But home will always be home.