Dear Younger Me,

As I start what should be my senior year of college I just wanted to write you something that I wish I would have had. I don’t want you to change anything about yourself, you have made it so far and are such a seriously talented young lady. Brace yourself for the year ahead and the coming years in college. You will be challenged.

This is your last season of soccer and one of the last times you’ll play competitively, cherish it. Cry when you win. Cry when you lose. Cry when you play that last away game at every single school. I’m crying right now thinking about how much I miss it. Cherish those moments with your team because you will draw on those experiences in college as you search for your sisters (yes, you eventually go Greek and love it) and deal with group projects.

Pay attention in class, those math classes will come in handy when you take your placement tests. Skipping pre-calculus would have made adding a business minor, now a major, a lot easier. Don’t even get me started on the two separate statistic classes you had to take. Beyond math though, pay attention to the ways your teachers treated you almost like their own kids. You don’t get that in college unless you go to every single office hour and actually get to know your professors (you don’t do that by the way, and you really should). You’re going to be stressed this year but I promise you that you will do fine. The stress will turn to relief as you get those acceptance letters and finally decide where to go (not NYU, but Temple is pretty awesome).

Fast forward to graduation and really take the time to appreciate those last moments with your classmates because you lose touch with almost all of them. Not that you really want to, it just happens. You are literally a different person today than you were at graduation and even at graduation from the beginning of senior year.

Freshman year is hard. You think about transferring but don’t. You have a bad relationship with your roommate (spoiler alert: it happens the next two years too!) and just kind of feel out of place. Then sophomore year comes around, you go through recruitment and find the home away from home you’ve been missing. These are your girls and although your “squad” changes within the sorority, there’s not a person you wouldn’t be there for in a crisis. Keeping these ladies close is what keeps you sane for the next year, because guess what? Junior year gets even harder and before you know it, “fit hits the shan.”

And then, before you even have time to catch up on your sleep, it’s fall 2016 and what’s supposed to be your senior year is starting. I wouldn’t say you have it easy, or really even that hard, from then until now but you’re not a quitter and you’re figuring it out. We, as past you and present I, are taking it all one step at a time and I couldn’t be happier for us.

We’re not the superstar we thought we were going to be. We’re not graduating even remotely on time. We’re not a picture of perfect health. But you know what? We’re not in rehab, we didn’t transfer home, we didn’t back down in the face of adversity and we’re not going to. We’re going to get better, smarter, friendlier, tougher, every single day. And I think that is all you need to know. Don’t change anything that happens because it’s all a part of our future and I’m starting to think it’s going to be brighter than we thought.

Love you.

From,

Me.