Immediately upon entering senior year, fear plagued every avenue of my mind. An unprecedented amount of stress about finding the right school for me, becoming confident in my major, coming to terms with leaving the people I care about, and much more placed road blocks in my mind that have at times prohibited me from reaching my full potential senior year. 

There have been moments this year when I have been able to negate these feelings and take charge of my own emotions. However, the task isn’t always as easy and sometimes ends in defeat. 

As I enter 2023, I can’t help but count down the time until graduation and moving away and realize how time is slipping through my fingers. The new year brings on a new set of fears as I am living through the most eventful and challenging period of my life. 

Senior year brings on a new set of emotions that I believe we can’t be expected to know how to handle. The situation is new and fresh and that’s new emotional territory most of us have never had to cover. 

With graduation lingering over my head, I tend to struggle with fears that I think the majority of my peers can relate to. 

It’s scary to think about how all facets of my life will change in the coming months. My bedroom will no longer be my warm place of refuge with my candles and my books that I call home; instead, it will just become my childhood bedroom that I pay a visit to a few times a year. 

My perfumes and jewelry will no longer line my vanity in the placement to which I have memorized them; instead, they will sit lonely on my dorm desk. My teenage girl life which I have romanticized to a point of complete love and enjoyment will no longer be the same and I will soon greet confusion at the door again. 

The truth is, nothing can prepare us for the amount of change that we will go through in the next year. It is scary, uncomfortable, and at moments feels earth shattering, but we are not alone. 

All of us will have relationships and friendships that will change. It has been said that distance makes the heart grow fonder, and with the distance that will come with our friends going to different universities, love, patience, attentiveness, and communication will all grow in that space allowing us to sustain our relationships. 

We will become better versions of ourselves. We will watch us grow into confident individuals that believe in ourselves and we will watch our friends fall into place exactly where they need to be. We will watch ourselves make mistakes and we will watch us grow from those mistakes. We will find more connection with each other when we come back together and we will know that we worried ourselves nearly to death for nothing. 

This is the most confusing and unsettling time of our young adult life, but rest assured that everything will be okay. You don’t have to believe that everything will be okay right now. Let your emotions stir up a little and become attached to the memories that you’re making this year, but we can’t prohibit ourselves from living in this moment because we are scared of the moments to come. 

We will find new moments to grow fondness for in the next chapter of our lives. 

As Taylor Swift once said, “You’re on your own, kid / Yeah you can face this / You’re on your own, kid / You always have been.”