I was listening to my iPod and a song I hadn’t listen to in a while came on. It was “Letter to Me” by Brad Paisley.The whole song is him talking to his seventeen year old self and the lyrics and concept of the song gave me the idea for this article. So here goes nothing.
Dear seventeen year old me,
Take a minute, and take a breath. It may not feel like you are going to make it but trust me, you are. You just graduated high school and are about to start college.
As you are finishing up high school, there is so much time spent counting down to the end and then when the end comes, you don’t want it to. You are constantly waiting for Friday night to come and the week to be over. STOP. Take the time to enjoy high school, trust me, you are going to miss it once you start college. Maybe not so much after the first year, but you sure as hell will that first year.
Everyone talks about how amazing the first year of college is, well, it may not be all that it is cracked up to be. You are going to struggle more that you ever thought you could. Classes are going to be a million times harder than what you were told and I am not going to sugar coat it, you are going to want to drop out more times than you care to admit. I would say that you should go in with the major you ended up changing into but the people you met during the year you spent in your original major and helped you through your first year made it well worth it.
Now here is something you probably never thought you would hear. The two people you call your best friends, it won’t be that way by the month after your eighteenth birthday. But don’t be sad about it, it is for the best. You took yourself out of the situation. When you’re the only one fighting, the fight may not be worth it. You may think that these two people are the greatest friends but God has even better friends waiting for you in the future.
Speaking of God, right now you couldn’t feel more distant from Him. You feel abandoned by Him. Just give it time. Your relationship with God is going to grow so much in the next few years. It is going to become such an important part of your life that it will seem like this part, the feeling abandoned part never happened. God is always there, it is up to us to let Him in. Maybe at this time in your life you are not ready for Him, but when you are, He is waiting with open arms.
In the next few years, there are going to be so many times where you are going to feel like quitting, but don’t. There are so many things that you have to look forward to. If only you could see the things that are going to happen.
To end this letter I am going to end it the same way that the song that inspired it was ended.
“Have no fear, these are no where near the best years of your life.”
The best years of your life are just ahead of you. Just you wait and see.
Love, your twenty-year-old self.
