It's 2020.

Hopefully, you're about to graduate. You're about to finally earn the coveted degree you've been working towards for four years. You're so close to getting that Finish Line Scholarship (thanks MTSU!). You're about to walk the line with the new friends you've made, and the professors you've been taught by may actually be proud of you.

This will be your huge accomplishment, definitely one of the biggest of your life, but I hope you've crossed some other things off your list too. Because now you're 20, and the beginning of your adult life has already began. So hopefully, you have finally begun living. I hope you moved out. Of course, you love your parents and your brother, your sister and all of your close family that lives less than 10 minutes away, but I hope you have started to stand on your own two feet. I hope you have a cute little apartment that you share with your best friend and someday your sister, and I hope you finally figured out where to put the 27 blankets you own.

I hope you find a boy who treats you well. By this, I for sure do not mean I hope you're engaged to be married and somehow in four short years you've found the one you want to spend your life with. If this happens, great! But if it doesn't, that'll be great too, and you need to remember that. I hope that if only for a short time the boy you've allowed to call you his girlfriend makes you feel like a queen. I hope you go on adventures with him and make memories. But also, I hope you experience heartbreak. In the past, it's made you strong. You grow from it and you learn from it. And although I hope your heart experiences joy, I hope it is strengthened by the stupid boy who forgot how important you are.

I hope you grow even more independent, and learn the ultimate lessons about boys: you don't need them. I hope you've tried something new. I hope you've been adventurous. I hope you have albums throughout your apartment chock full of memories from the past four years. I hope you've made your parents proud. I hope you've excelled in your studies. But honestly, more than anything, I hope you don't feel so stuck. I hope you find yourself. I hope you learn that routine is boring and instead, experience is what you need to be living for. I hope you like yourself. I hope you are ready to start living even more so than you already have, because now, after four long years, you actually have the time. I hope you're fantastic, and if, for some reason, you are not, I hope you are okay with that. So here's to the next four, here's to new memories to make, and here's to you. I hope you are even better off than I've written about.