I visited home this weekend for the first time since coming to college. The funny thing is this: I’m pretty much limping my way through my first semester with very limited social interaction and classes that are kicking my ass one thousand four hundred and thirty-eight miles away from home, and somehow my high school friends back home view me as an authority on college.

I’m sorry, what?!

This is me. This is the same person who hadn’t even signed up for the SAT this time last year, who picked up a pamphlet for the army despite being pretty aggressively pacifistic because she was so freaked out about college. This is the same person who asked every high school alumnus how to make friends at university when they came back to visit, and most of all, the person that spent all the money from her summer job on a plane ticket home after barely a month because California is just that scary. And here’s the thing: I haven’t changed all that much.

There is no world where I am an authority on college or how to do it. But neither is anyone else. So I have a couple words for the friends dragging themselves across their high school finish lines, the friends who are racing through new majors at different colleges, and everyone who thinks that they should have a little more of life figured out by now.

You aren’t going to be the authority on anything relevant. Ever. As soon as I am an authority on college, I won’t need to be. That is to say, I won’t know everything there is to know about college until I am essentially done with college; until it isn’t my priority anymore. Once I know how to be a college student, I will not know how to be a professional or a teacher or a mother or wife. Authority happens only in retrospect. And as demoralizing as that sounds at first, it’s a bit of a relief when it sits there for a while. You have permission to be wrong. You have permission to change your mind. And you don’t just have permission to seek information and share your experiences while you’re learning; You have an obligation to in the same way that I do.

We all have some hazy idea of what life after school and degrees and living with our parents looks like and none of us have let go of it completely yet. Even when I knew that sixteen was just a driving age and eighteen was just a voting age and twenty-one was just a drinking age, I maintained a subconscious expectation beyond the cognitive understanding of adulthood that, at some point, I would cross the magic barrier into grown-up-ness and understand how life is supposed to work.

That doesn’t happen.

See, I’m not an authority on how college works. I haven’t figured it out. I’m nowhere close. But when my friends at home asked me about it, I shrugged and told them what I could figure out as well as what I couldn’t. I told them that going to the gym regularly was a good way to regulate schedules. I told them that I slept through class one day (sorry Dad) because I still don’t hear my alarm. I told them that it was very different than high school, but not necessarily better. My picture of college wasn’t shiny or optimistic and I’m not even sure it was helpful. But it was true.

Here’s what I’m getting at: I set a bunch of end goals for myself. My high school graduation was a big finish line. I did not expect to launch right into another race right after crossing it, but that’s how life works. Life doesn’t sanction itself off into neat little boxes.

The finish line has no bearing on my maturity or experiences. It’s another step that is not really any more significant that a step in the middle of the race; graduation day is another day that is not much more important than today. It’s all painfully gradual and that’s why we don’t get to wake up and realize we’re adults. And that is not a bad thing.

We may not be authorities. We may never feel grown up. But how amazing is it that there is always another race?