Welcome to life. You’ve made it to your 20s. You’ve done everything society has mandated of you.

You did the whole high school thing. You went to your hometown football games every Friday night, went out with your clique to dinner and a movie every Saturday night and then did the homework and studying needed to get the grades good enough for the colleges to accept you. Graduation day finally arrived and the end of an era occurred.

Time for the big leagues, College.

Freshman year came with all the bells and whistles you would expect, and you completed all the rituals that have come to be. You did the whole freshman look while walking around campus with your lanyard around your neck, arrived early to classes and picked a seat in the front and spent every spare moment with your roommates. Then you partied your way through the weekend, which starts on Thursday if you are living your college year’s right. Maybe you dated a few of the typicals, the jock, the nerd and even the TA. You start to notice your grades are dropping and you start to point yourself back in the right direction. But after skipping Friday classes for the last four months, you end your freshman year with a few Cs.

Just remember, Cs get degrees.

Sophomore year flashed right past you. You lost of a few friends during the summer when time just wasn’t on your side, and transfers to different universities occurred and then especially when you gave up the party girl life. Your grades amped up, you did the internship thing and got a few references telling you just how great your coffee fetching skills are, and got some real life work experience with other students who you’ll probably be the boss of one day.

Now it’s time for junior year. By now you should probably have your shit together right? You should know who you want to be and what you’ll need to do to accomplish that. You should know where you see yourself living and with who you’ll be experiencing the next few years. Will you be with your same significant other by the end of college? Will you move back home to live with your parents or start working minimum wage job? Or is that degree you’ve been working towards going to be your life line? It is right? That is the whole reason for busting your butt. But what about outside of school and work. Do you have people you want to spend the rest of your life with? What about just you? Who is the person you are becoming? Are you strong and wise, are you anxious and lost? How is the next two years really going to help you find yourself?

College isn’t about finding yourself, or even losing yourself. It about the education, about the memories and about those who you spend these years with. It’s what you find along the way that will make the hardships worth it. If I find myself, I'm so glad. But if it takes me the next ten years to truly know who I am, I’ll take it. I’d rather make the bad decisions while I can reverse them. I’d rather live life in oblivion and happiness, then be set on just who I’ll be in the future. Maybe she’ll be the same me, maybe she’ll be smarter, or stronger. But I hope she remembers it is OK to be lost, because in the end, the journey is the best part of reaching the destination.