There’s always a strange kind of feeling when you’re ending a chapter of your life. It’s not loud or dramatic. There are no confetti or streamers.
You’re left with a quiet feeling of in-betweenness, like you’re standing in a doorway, one foot still inside the place you’ve known, the other already reaching toward whatever comes next.
It’s the moment you realize you’ve been living inside a moment for the last three years, and suddenly, you’re standing just outside of it, looking back through the glass.
I didn’t realize how much I was becoming until I started running out of time to be her.
When I arrived at Saint Bonaventure University, I thought college was going to be a sequence of big, obvious transformations. I expected every milestone to be met with fireworks and a round of applause.
I went into every semester with the idea that I would finally realize who I am, and to automatically find clarity and confidence. Instead, it was slower, almost unnoticeable until it was over.
It was becoming the girl who raised her hand in class to answer a question, even when her voice shook a little.
I was staying up way too late, overthinking relationships, assignments, and my future, but somehow waking up every morning, putting a smile on my face, and showing up even though it was hard.
It was learning that resilience doesn’t always look like strength, showing up through simply choosing to keep going.
Somewhere between classes, club meetings, meals in the dining hall, nights out, and quiet moments where I wasn’t sure I was doing any of it right, I started to understand something I didn’t have words for before:
I wasn’t becoming a finished version of myself. I was becoming someone who could keep evolving.
There were versions of me I don’t talk about often. The girl who felt like she was always a step behind everyone else. The one who compared her timeline, her body, her friendships, her college experience to invisible expectations that she never actually believed in.
I constantly found myself attempting to embody the image of a “perfect” college girl, pushing myself to have some type of transformation, when deep down, I just wanted to be myself.
But even that version mattered— especially that version.
Because she taught me what growth really looks like.
Saint Bonaventure didn’t just give me a degree in psychology; it taught me how to be human. I’m leaving college with an education in noticing people, in realizing that everyone is carrying something inside. In understanding that healing and growing are not linear, and neither is confidence, or happiness, or identity
There were days I felt completely certain of who I was becoming, and other days when I felt like I had no idea at all. I used to think that meant I was doing something wrong. Now I think it just means I was paying attention.
Her Campus became a strange kind of mirror for me in all of this. Not because I always had the right words, but because I learned how to find them. Writing weekly articles forced me to slow down long enough to actually hear myself think. To turn experiences into meaning. To take feelings I used to brush past and sit with them instead.
It turns out I don’t just want to live through things; I want to understand them.
And maybe that’s the biggest change of all.
As I get closer to graduation, I keep thinking about how badly I once wanted certainty. I wanted to know exactly what I was doing, exactly where I was going, exactly who I was going to be when I got there. But I think I’ve finally made peace with something different.
I just need to keep becoming:
Someone who still feels deeply.
Someone who still shows up even when she has no faith in herself.
Someone who can look back at every version of herself, not with regret, but with gratitude.
Because every version of me got me here.
So I’m not saying goodbye to college like it’s something I’m leaving behind.
I think I’m saying thank you. To all the messy, uncertain, growing versions of me who made it possible to get to this point.
And maybe that’s what this really is. Not a final article. Not a final version of myself. Just proof that I was here. And that I was becoming.