In high school, you think you have it all figured out. You'll leave home, go to college, get good grades, make great friends, maybe fall in love. You spend all of senior year reciting the "what are your plans?" speech after being bombarded during any kind of family gathering. The summer is spent doing fun, spontaneous things with your group of friends before you all go your separate ways in August. Every day you get a little more excited, and every day you tell yourself you are just so ready to leave this town and everything in it behind. And then it's time to pack eighteen years of life into a dorm room the size of your closet, and you realize that maybe you weren't so ready after all.
You'll realize that being an "adult" isn't everything it's cracked up to be. That having to buy your own toilet paper and paper towels isn't fun at all, and you'll wonder how your mom survives the nightmare that is called the grocery store every week. You'll learn to live off the bare minimum, and you'll learn what is really necessary. Shampoo is expensive, do you really need to rinse and repeat? Plus, do you really want to lose your 3rd row parking spot because you had to go to the store? No thanks.
You'll miss sharing a bathroom with your sister because she knows you leave the toothpaste open, or you splash water on the counter when you wash your face. And she accepts it. Sharing a bathroom with your roommates or living out of a shower caddy is weird, and is comparable to the awkward stage of a new relationship. Will they judge me because I forget to take the hair out of my hairbrush? Or because I don't always take my smeared mascara off right away after I shower?
You'll go from being a straight-A student to having a C+, and being proud of it. You'll spend so many hours at the library that the 2 AM cleaning crew knows the trashcan at the third table on the left will be full of coffee cups and jolly rancher wrappers, but just the blue ones because those are the best. You'll have classes that make you say "what the heck was I thinking?" when you declared your major, and you'll have classes that make you say "what the heck was I thinking?" when you decided to go to college.
College is hard, and scary, and maybe you'll realize that you never really did have it all figured out. Or that the plan you had for yourself, wasn't the one you were meant to follow. But the path you were meant to follow will teach you things you never knew, things that won't be found in a textbook or graded on a A-F, 4.0 grading scale. You'll learn you are stronger than you ever thought possible, that you're worth so much more than a good test score, and that the person you're becoming, is the person you were always meant to be. So appreciate your hometown and its strange quirks, but know that there is a great big world out there just waiting for you. Hold on tight to the nights you and your mom stay up gossiping, or the nights you drive around town jamming to some 2000's pop with your sister, but know that the people you will meet at school will make you question how you survived your first eighteen years without them.
You'll leave home, go to college, get good grades, make great friends, maybe fall in love. But always remember to embrace the new, to embrace the uncomfortable. You never know what incredible things it will bring you.
