To the Lonely, Bookish, and Introverted High School Senior,

These past four years have been tough… the hardest years of your life and I’d be lying to you if I said that it gets easier, because it doesn’t… It doesn’t get easier, however, it gets more bearable.

You’ve spent your high school years in the shadows; trying to get all your school work done and trying to Ace all your classes so you can finally get out of this nightmare you are told to call “High School”, but you were never really involved in school. You never joined any clubs or teams, you didn’t run for student body president and you were certainly not Miss or Mr. Popularity. Maybe you were even like me and you ate lunch in the library, spending your twenty minutes of solitude listening to Ben Howard or Bon Iver. Maybe you even spent those twenty minutes talking to the librarians or the clerks at the front desk because it felt like they were the only ones who understood you or didn’t care about how you dressed and whether or not your favorite television show was Keeping Up With The Kardashians. You probably spent Friday nights at home, watching Netflix and browsing through the popular crowd’s social media posts about the different parties they were at… parties you didn’t even know existed.

On that Friday night you are spending at home on the couch binge watching Netflix, and eating Cool Ranch Doritos you wonder what it is that you have done wrong for four years. You wonder how you have made it through four years of force-fed group projects, senior class bonding, and all the nonsense teachers use to try and force your graduating class to come together and be “Friends 4 Eva” but everyone still seems to be a stranger to you. You begin to realize high school isn’t like the 80’s movies. It’s not like The Breakfast Club where all you have to do is be locked in Saturday Detention with four complete strangers and then you will all get to know each other like the way childhood best friends know one another. Its obscene, how you can spend four years with the same people… See them grow up but yet you still don’t know anything about your so called “peers” other than what they post on Instagram and Twitter.

So instead of spending your four years of High School being involved and going to parties and doing all these things you are supposed to do your teenage years you spent your four years studying. Maybe you read the Harry Potter series seven complete times like myself and graduated high school with straight A’s or maybe you binge watched Glee on Netflix after acing your chemistry exam. Whatever it was, you did all this in hopes that you could get into any college of your desire… and you probably did.

Let me tell you this: college is a brand new chapter of your life. It’s a fresh start, a place where you can leave the last four years behind you and become the person you want to be, the person that you had always hoped you could be. So spend the summer trying to find this person… who you actually are or maybe who you want to be. Buy some new clothes that make you feel good and get a summer job where you are forced to socialize with people your age. Do not get a single dorm! Get a double! Maybe even get a triple! Get to know your future roomies more than just “who is bringing the mini fridge?” When you get to college join some clubs! As many as you can fit into your schedule and go to meetings. Put yourself out there and step out of your comfort zone because college is nothing like high school. In college it doesn’t matter how you dress, or if you exhibit what is considered the “social norms”. People in college are trying to survive. Survive their 8ams and their all nighters and the finals they probably didn’t study for. They are trying to make memories, and even that popular girl in high school, she wants to be different than the person she was the past four years. You’ll make friends, probably meet your best friends and you will meet some of the most amazing, talented, and intelligent people you will ever meet.

Putting yourself out there will not be easy. This is what I meant when I said that it doesn’t get easier, but it will get more bearable. It’ll be uncomfortable, probably one of the hardest things you will ever do but when you are sitting back your last few weeks of your freshman year of college (like myself right now) and you reminisce about the year you will realize how much better you'll feel about yourself and how much of a different person you have become. You will realize how silly you were for believing that those four years of high school were the defining factor for the rest of your life.