High school can feel like it lasts forever. Then you get to college, and that totally changes. Those four years completely shaped and transformed me; at times it doesn’t even feel like it was that long.

There’s not exactly a single word I can find to sum up my high school experience. Emotions come just like my memories, in vibrant but individual bursts. A cheer at a football game, rolled eyes in a silent classroom, a laugh in a hallway, tears in an empty bathroom.

There is no one term to sum up high school because it was not one singular experience. And though I did not always enjoy my experiences in high school, they are something for which I will always be grateful.

So here I am, looking back, saying all the things I wish I could tell that version of myself that first strode through those halls.

You are young. You don’t know it yet, but you are so, so young. Young and full of ideals and hopes and passion that is not yet placed.

You will begin high school expecting the very best of times, wanting it to be everything that the movies have taught you it should be.

It won’t be. It will be terrible, and difficult, and disheartening and exhausting. It will make you sob and scream and find an anger that you never knew you had.

You’ll hate it.

But that’s okay. Because it will also be wonderful, and inspiring, and invigorating. It will make you laugh and feel boundless.

And you will love it.

If there’s any lesson you will take away from these next four years, it’s that things don’t always work out the way that you think you want them to. But they always work out for the best, in the end.

So that girl who’s your best friend? She won’t be speaking to you by the end of freshman year. By the end of senior year that whole group that you consider yours will be a bunch of people that you used to know. But it’s okay. Now you have new people, and they make you remember what it is to be stupidly happy and not know why.

And that guy you so desperately want to notice you? By homecoming, you’ll barely remember his name. There will be many names, many beautiful faces that cause you pain, and it will all be okay. You will fall in love and be ripped out of it. You will cry and shout and find an anger that you don’t know how to control. But it’s okay. Now you have learned to love yourself and find some comfort in the importance of that.

And that school that you so badly want to get into? That school will change once, twice, three times, so many times you lose track. You will end up in the place you never would have guessed, but where you know you will find the most joy.

Those four years will change you, shape you, lead you. The girl that first entered those doors four years ago is not the same girl that left in May.

So be brave, be careful, but breathe. It is okay. You will be okay