I went into my senior year like I was the protagonist of some John Green coming-of-age movie. I foolishly and naively believed that, despite the downright suckiness of the past three years, that senior year would be my year. I was determined to keep my 4.0, breathe new air into my school’s dying Speech and Debate team, spend as much time with my friends as possible in our last year together, and overall conquer my senior year like it was a quest I had been training for all my life.

Let’s just say, if my senior year was a quest, I pretty much tripped over a flat surface to my own pitiful death on the first day.

No bueno. Very, very, no bueno.

Senior year was hard. As per usual, I was unprepared for the bumps and obstacles that life throws at you, and even more unprepared for my own shortcomings. I lost my 4.0. I revived the Speech and Debate team at the cost of my own personal success and performance. Some friends I wanted to keep stopped talking to me for reasons I still don’t know of. And, to be honest, even my love life sucked. Not that I was looking for a romance in the last year of high school because I know that’s stupid, but I don’t know, I guess I got a little lonely.

Through my own journey of having idealistic expectations subverted by reality, I have a lot of advice to give to the class of 2017:

First, don’t give in to senioritis, but also don’t work yourself so hard that you sacrifice your health and relationships. There is a middle ground. Try hard in your classes, stay organized, manage your time well, and then give yourself a break daily, if you can, just for you to relax and wind down. Depending on the senior year schedule, you might be taking a bunch of easy electives, in which it should be no problem getting all A’s, as long as you do the homework. Or you might be like me and be taking several challenging AP’s where trying hard might not guarantee you the A that you want. This leads me to my next point…

Senior year is about letting go. Through your whole life up until this point, you’ve kind of grown up in a bubble. In this bubble, you’ve formed a lot of opinions and assumptions about everything, despite having only been exposed to a significantly small part of the world. As you transition from your adolescence to adulthood, a lot of these opinions and assumptions are going to be refuted by real-world experiences that are never sugar-coated. The most obvious example is that the B+ less than 0.5 points away from being an A- that you may have been able to get rounded up in high school, won’t be in college. Before college, I recommend that you let go of your desire of a 4.0, because even though it’s possible, it’s really hard to achieve in college.

Grades aren’t the only thing you need to let go of. You also need to let go of high school relationships and friendships if it feels like they are beginning to fall apart. Don’t try to save them, let them fall apart because senior year is when you realize who your real friends are, the ones you’ll stay in contact with throughout your entire lives.

Your senior year, in my opinion, is meant to be a transition between the world you’ve grown up and the real world. A time for you to discover that you have to be able to advocate, stand up for, and heal yourself in the real world. You have to be able to let go of negative aspects of your life for your own well-being. You have to realize that the only person you’re going to be with for your entire life is you and that this isn’t depressing, but simply an indicator that you need to make sure that you love yourself and are happy. That’s more important than any grade or college acceptance letter. Believe me, I know.