To the girl I was four years ago,

There's so much I wish I could tell you and so much advice I wish I could give, but I don't have an infinite amount of time so we'll need to settle for these words that I'm about to write. My words will likely fall on deaf ears for you are me and I am you and I was never good at taking my own advice, but I'll try anyway.

It's crazy, thinking about just how much is going to change over the next four years. One of the biggest changes that you can expect is that some of the people you are friends with now will no longer be in your life when you're my age and you will be much better off. Whether it be by how people naturally drift away or by a conscious decision, they will be gone but you will be so much happier that you won't miss them. You probably don't believe me because you're currently blinded by high school thoughts of forever but college is an entirely different game. You know that quote, "between the ages of 16 to 22 you meet a lot of temporary people"? That's about you. That's completely about you, and the best part? You won't even be sad about it because you are giving up a life you didn't want for the one you've always wanted to live.

In the span of these next four years, you are going to be hurt, upset, angry, humiliated, alone, lonely, and at times it will feel like the entire world is against you because nothing will go the way you want. Even so, there will be times when you will feel overjoyed to the point of tears. You will laugh until you swear you have an eight-pack and you'll feel like you're on the very top of the world. The bad days in the future are only twenty-four hours and they will end, just as how the sun will set and rise to give a new day and a new twenty-four hours filled with new possibilities.

You are going to take a page out of one of your favorite character's books and determine the fate of your own happiness rather than wait for things to happen and rule your own life. You will stop letting people walk all over you, and leaving you alone in your room on Friday nights because you have tried everything to make plans but nobody is responding and you're just feeling so lonely that there's an ache in your chest where your heart is that just won't go away no matter how many times you try to get it out.

You're going to go off on your own and it's the scariest thing you will ever do but please trust me on this and you're going to create a new path for yourself because the one you will start to go on isn't the right one. You'll know what I mean when the time comes, so promise me you'll listen and you won't be afraid or sad about it. I wouldn't be writing this letter to you if something was to go tragically wrong, would I? I am you, after all.

It's actually quite the contrary.

There will be a night that you'll see someone you've known since the beginning of your first semester but never really had the time to connect with and she will ask you to join her and two friends for dinner, and then she'll invite you out with her and some of her other friends. This sounds odd but trust me, it will become one of the best nights of your life and it will become one of the best stories you'll be able to tell your future kids about how you became best friends with a crazy girl that was so like you but at the same time was not. Through her you're going to meet many more incredible people that will become your circle of friends and you are going to have many more amazing nights with these new friends that will teach you the true value of friendship and your own worth.

You will become someone that people go to for help with schoolwork. Right now you are the one asking questions but soon people will actually be asking you, and you will be incredibly good at explaining things! So good in fact, you'll become a tutor in the subjects and people will always say how kind and helpful you are. You'll become someone you've always wished you could be, and it's one of the best feelings ever.

Flash forward to this year, four years from where you are now, you'll join new groups and meet even more new people, including ones that you will be able to call your sisters and teammates and great friends. You will meet someone that will become another best friend and one of your biggest fans and supporters and she will make you shine like the star you never knew you could be but this friend always saw it. You'll know she'll be in your life for the rest of your days and the world will seem a little bit brighter knowing that you will have absolutely no chance of being alone when you get older.

Right now it may seem impossible, that what I am saying is a lie but I promise you everything I'm saying is one thousand percent real. You find yourself, you begin to love yourself, you fall back in love with life again. You will watch your dreams start to come true, you will start thinking of your own success and the amazing qualities that make you who you are rather than how your self worth depends on the opinions of others or grades on exams. You will start to see yourself the way your friends do, as someone who tries to see the beauty in everything and tries to treat others with kindness and graciousness because you know how it feels to feel worthless like the gum on the bottom of someone's shoe, but you won't ever feel like that anymore. You have too great a support system for that to ever happen again, too many people that love and care about you.

You will be happy. Even with some bumps in the road, some feeling more like mountains and trenches, you will come out strong and you will be happy, and you will be loved. Always remember that your future is brighter than the sun, and you will survive these next years and reach where I am now and you will know that everything was worth it to feel how I feel right now, writing this.

I hope this makes you excited. I hope this makes you feel good about the uncertainty that the future brings because I know that was always something that made you a little nervous. I wish I could give this to you to tell you everything will be okay but I know I can't because you are me and I am you and I have lived through all of this already. I can only look back on my memories and let them go, because my future has more power over me than my past ever could and that's one thing I will always remember.

Good luck out there, though you won't need it. The future is yours, you just need to go out and grab it.

Love always,

Me