“The two hardest things to say in life are hello for the first time and goodbye for the last.” – Moira Rogers

To Freshman Me,

It was undoubtedly difficult to enter RM with the task on hand to find new friends and quickly make sense of high school. Traversing extracurriculars, standardized testing,and college applications surely was not any easier. But it has come down to the last week of senior year, and I think that saying goodbye to it all during graduation will be a thousand times harder.
It is a hackneyed statement: life is about the journey, not the destination. But I happen to be a big fan of cliches. Change and growth are laws of nature that each have a perpetual process of discovery and uncertainty attached to them. I am a senior, and while my college decisions may seem to be the destination, they only opened a whole new chapter ahead full of possibilities and experience.
If I went back to freshman year, I wouldn’t change my journey at all. Rejection brought new opportunities, distance led to irreplaceable relationships, and mistakes allowed for much-needed reflection. I learned that even though so many of us have built walls of achievement and success, we all have our own cracks in them. We face similar challenges of insecurity and anxiety–and just when we think we have gotten rid of one, another pops up.
Over the last four years, I’ve grown through countless late nights of heart-to-hearts and advice. The sum of peculiarities, passions, and experiences of people at school built bonds absolutely stimulating. I learned how to sometimes stop worrying about the little things and start being able to enjoy–to live spontaneously and to soak it all in. There were a lot of tears and heaps of failure, but laughter always managed to follow sometime afterwards, with no intent to stop.
Thank you to my brilliant teachers and peers whose ideas during discussions opened my mind to new opinions and experiences. Thank you to my brother and my parents who cheered me on during my highest highs and lifted me up in my lowest lows. I may have to say goodbye to high school soon, but I will never forget the people who made up what I remember of my RM journey.