Let me tell you a secret: You’re only young once.
And it may not feel like it while sitting up at 4 a.m. with all your friends studying, exhaustion seeping into your bones but smiles still on your faces. And it may not feel like it when you’re elbow-deep in notes and highlighters and textbooks, or when you get final grades back and it feels like falling, or when people are talking about jobs and internships and grad school applications and it’s only the first semester of freshman year.
But the other day, I was looking through my pictures from the end of my senior year and the summer before college, and I was struck by how full of raw happiness they were. I can remember every minute detail of those days, of the ways I laughed until I ached with my best friends and took adventures with them because we could. I remember how it made leaving all that much harder come August and also how in the worst days of my freshman year, I clung to those remembrances with all my might.
And I know summer is fast approaching, and even though you want it to be a vacation, it may already feel like it isn’t. Most of my friends are off studying abroad or taking prestigious internships, and that can make you feel like you’re supposed to be doing something else, something more.
Yes, these things are important. But it’s OK if they’re not happening right now, at this very second. You are allowed to take time, to take a deep breath, to take a break. You’re allowed to want to crowd around your best friend’s porch with sweatshirts and chocolate and just talk until the earliest hours of the morning. You’re allowed to be involved in extracurricular activities and still want to have fun this summer.
When I was looking back on those pictures just the other day, I was filled with this overwhelming sense of completeness. I spent three months with my best friends, making memories I’ll never forget and learning more about myself and about each other than I ever thought possible. And while it may not be the same this summer—we’ve all split apart a thousand different directions and our lives are so startlingly different than they were just a year ago—it will still be amazing.
And when I’m back at school in August, struggling through my reading and exams papers, I will look back on the pictures that we will have taken, and think about the memories that we made, and I’m going to smile.
