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I have stared at this screen for far too long, trying to understand how to write the sentence I never believed would arrive: this is my last piece for Her Campus. In three days, I will graduate from college. Next month, I’ll move to New York. Somewhere between those two facts, I grew up.
How strange it is to realize that growing up does not happen all at once. It happens silently. In fragments. In dorm rooms and airport terminals. In library corners and late-night parking lots. In tears I wiped away before class. In laughter so hard it makes your ribs ache. In mornings you thought would break you and evenings that somehow stitched you back together.
I used to think life would announce itself when it was changing. I thought there would be music swelling in the background, some cinematic sign that said pay attention, this is the part where everything shifts. But life is more subtle than that. It changes while you are busy answering emails, spilling coffee on your shirt, walking to class half-awake, calling your mom, kissing the wrong person, meeting the right friend, boarding a plane, missing someone terribly, writing papers at 2 a.m., and believing you still have more time than you do.
Then one day, you look up, and it is over.
The other day, I walked across campus and looked at my freshman dorm with the mountains behind it. I physically felt something move inside me. Not break. Not disappear. Shift. Like tectonic plates beneath the skin. Like the version of me who arrived here with trembling hands was stepping aside for the woman who gets to leave.
College, for me, has been the art of becoming.
It has been changing and changing again. Falling in and out of love with people, cities, ideas, versions of myself. It has been trying on identities like clothes in a fitting room, holding them up to the mirror and asking, Is this me? Is this almost me? It has been searching for me in every professor, every country, every playlist, every article, every person who made my heart race or my chest ache.
And the miracle is this: I found pieces of myself in all of it.
I found myself in the gold light on campus buildings before sunset. In jewelry worn to feel brave. In songs played too loudly with the windows down. In every friend I have hugged, while laughing so hard I could barely breathe. In every risk that made me nauseous beforehand and proud afterward. In every plane ticket booked, because something in me whispered, go.
I found myself in writing.
Writing has been the only thing that consistently made the world make sense. It has taken the chaos of being alive and turned it into something I could hold in my hands. When joy felt too big, writing carried it. When grief felt too sharp, writing softened its edges. When I did not know who I was becoming, writing reminded me I was becoming at all.
There were seasons of college that glittered. There were also seasons that nearly swallowed me whole.
This final semester was one of the hardest of my life. A full course load. A full-time job. An internship. A fellowship. Responsibilities stacked so high I often wondered if I had mistaken ambition for self-destruction. There were mornings I woke up already tired. Days so long they felt cruel. Weeks where I feared I had finally reached the edge of what I could do.
But I did it.
Not gracefully, not perfectly, not without crying in my car or eating dinners at absurd hours or questioning everything. But I did it.
And maybe that is the more useful version of success anyway.
Not the polished one. Not the one that smiles for LinkedIn photos and pretends ease. The real one. The exhausted one. The one that keeps going with mascara smudged and five tabs open and a heart that still believes effort matters.
I have learned that gratitude can feel strangely similar to impostor syndrome. That being blessed does not mean life will be easy. That joy and guilt sometimes sit beside each other. That loneliness grows in locked rooms. That if you want to be part of a village, you must become a villager.
Sometimes becoming a villager simply means getting dressed, putting on your favorite outfit, and showing up for one hour. Sometimes it means texting first. Sometimes it means asking if someone got home safely. Sometimes it means bringing your whole messy self into the room and trusting that love can survive honesty.
I have learned that female friendships are among the holiest things on earth.
There are women who know every version of me. Women who picked me up when boys dropped me. Women who sat beside me on floors and in bathrooms and in parked cars while I unraveled. Women who laughed with me in the middle of the night until life felt possible again. Women who rearranged my soul by loving me plainly and consistently.
Romance is often glorified as the great love story of youth, but friendship is what carried me through it.
I have learned that boys come and go. Hearts break and heal and break again. Some people arrive only to teach you what leaving feels like. Some people hold mirrors to your wounds. Some people make wonderful memories and terrible futures. Some people are not meant to stay.
That is life.
Let them go.
Keep the lesson. Keep the tenderness. Keep the standards they accidentally taught you. But let them go.
I have learned that feeling something deeply, even briefly, is better than feeling nothing at all.
I have learned that time moves with terrifying speed.
It feels impossible that I am here now because when I first dreamed of college, I was surrounded by an entirely different cast of people. Different faces, different fears, different plans. Yet somehow certain souls remained constant. My high school friends I called every week. My roommates who stood by me through everything. My parents and siblings, the spine beneath every risk I have ever taken.
No one becomes alone.
Every achievement is crowded with fingerprints.
And now New York waits for me like some impossible sentence I once wrote in a notebook and underlined twice. I am moving there next month. How absurd. How beautiful. How exactly what younger me would have wanted.
If college taught me anything, it is this: life is too short to abandon the thing that keeps returning to your mind.
The dream that taps on your shoulder every morning. The idea that follows you into showers and walks and sleepless nights. The place you cannot stop imagining. The career that scares you because you want it so badly. The person you know you should tell. The friendship you know you should leave. The version of yourself trying to get your attention.
Go.
Go to the country.
Apply for the job.
Say the words.
End the cycle.
Book the flight.
Write the article.
Become the person.
Life does not reward hesitation nearly as often as people pretend.
We are all, in some strange way, blank pages handed weather and color. We are folded, crumpled, erased, scribbled on, stained, rewritten. We are loved into softness and hurt into sharpness. We are not meant to remain pristine. We are meant to become interesting.
And I think that is what these years did to me.
They made me interesting.
They made me softer in some places, stronger in others. They gave me better stories, better instincts, better people. They taught me how to work. How to leave. How to stay. How to begin again.
So yes, I just finished my last class of college.
How is this real?
In the blink of an eye, I grew up.
I did it.
And with great pleasure, with tears in my throat and youth still rushing warm through my blood, I sign off.