When I came to college, I was a girl trapped inside a body, pretending to be someone that I wasn’t. I was known as “the girlfriend.” I didn’t ever get invited to anything because people assumed they would ask my long-term boyfriend and I would go with him. And if he didn’t go, then obviously I wouldn’t either. I was the cheerleader. I was a follower. I was lost.

When I moved away to school, I was suddenly surrounded by people I didn’t know--people who actually wanted to talk to me for the first time in my life. People saw me as myself even before I really knew who I was. During my first few weeks I fell in love with my “new” self. It’s like I was re-invented or brought to light or really just seen after feeling invisible for so long.

However, back at home I still had ghosts. I was being torn between the self I was there and the self I was at school. Suddenly, it was like I was being suffocated by all the people I knew from high school and all of the places that reminded me of my now ex-boyfriend in my home town. The people I once called my best friends had drifted away from me, and I had let them. So while I was making my now closest friends of my life, partying, and going to school for something I loved (every college student’s dream), this was one of the darkest and loneliest times of my life.

I spent a lot of my time thinking about my “old” self and going out too much. I spent a lot of time running away from things because I was too scared to accept that I was a different person now, even though that’s what I had thought I had wanted all along. I had a new town, new friends, new stories, but I still felt like there was something dragging me down. And once again, I was the girl pretending to make other people happy.

I wasn’t happy, though. In fact, I was absolutely miserable. But I always smiled, hoping that suddenly I would believe it, too. Because when you're living a life you don't want, even if it makes you temporarily happy, in the end you will once again end up like you had before. And that's when I realized I needed to do something. After many hungover mornings, dying my hair black, and about a million regretful texts, I realized that although this process had been a roller-coaster of fear and loss, it was also full of everything else, too. If I was sad, why shouldn't I be sad? If I wanted to dye my hair, who cares, as long as it was what I wanted to do?

The other day my best friend said to me, “People don’t change for you, they change for themselves.” And that's a lesson I've learned: you are the most important person in your life. You might change something because you feel lost or because you’re bored or you have no other options, and that’s the scariest part. But taking that first step is what led you to the path you knew you wanted to follow all along.

So whether you think change can be bad and scary and unknown, which is true, it also takes those things to change yourself for the better. To find yourself, you may think you have to change things about yourself, which might just be the case. That’s not a bad thing. I found myself by changing myself, for myself.

By the end of my first year, I figured out that regardless if it’s making new friends or buying a new wardrobe or moving away or eliminating certain things from your life, or maybe not even changing at all, it doesn’t matter. Change is good and bad and scary, but if you’re only living a life for other people, then you will always be lost. Doing things for yourself is how you learn who you are. And who knows, I know who I am today, but maybe tomorrow I won’t. I’ve learned to take the days as they come.