With just a mere few days until officially starting my last semester as an undergraduate in college, I find myself overwhelmed with a flood of feelings on a day-to-day basis.

To make matters worse, the pressure is officially on for what the next steps of my life should be in regards to career choices and unofficial plans for the next four years of my post-grad life. Funny enough, I'm faced with these thoughts most when I'm staring blankly at a row of tequila shots sitting before me, in an almost dark and definitely dingy bar somewhere downtown.

As I sit before these tall, clear shot glasses, surrounded by my girlfriends and the random college kids around me, equally as drunk and irresponsible as me, I always go back to one thought: that these girls I call my best friends and these random people I go to school with have, more than once, felt this same exact feeling I feel almost every day.

The feeling that they're not good enough for the "real world" and honestly, we should embrace this feeling with open arms.

Yes, I agree that it's easy to suppress this feeling than actually come to terms with reality, but having said that, I also believe that with this crippling fear of not being good enough, comes the feeling of peace when we come to the realization that everyone our age is feeling this same exact way, at that exact moment.

With this peace of mind, also comes the peace of knowing that along with some things working out the way we want, other things just won't work out the way we initially intended.

Although it's easier said than done to throw in the towel from all the fallen efforts we've put forth to become the most successful versions of ourselves, it's also easier said than done to take that step back to reassess what exactly went wrong in the process. Once done, comes the easiest part: comfort.

Comfort in knowing that we've felt this feeling of defeat before and what happened after it was just one of the many defeats we'll have to inevitably face in years to come.

That specific ache we feel in the pit of our stomachs from tiny failures throughout our lives never really goes away but it matures. Similar to how we've (for the most part) matured throughout these past four years of our lives, these tiny failures have seemed to mask themselves as lessons. Lessons that we, unfortunately, won't learn from until much, much later on in our lives.

As I sat before the lines of tequila shots in the past, listening to the same nostalgic Saturday night playlist at Tom and Marty's, I'm mentally preparing myself to sit through those same lines of shot glasses in the next few months of my undergrad career.

Staring blankly at those same shots and the bartender that just handed me a lime and a salt shaker. But instead of feeling the (now old) crippling fear of "not being good enough", I'm mentally prepared to take three breathes and face those so-called failures that I know to be masked with lessons waiting to be learned.