On the night before my eighteenth birthday, I went to dinner at Capital Grille with my sister, my brother-in-law, and my mom who had flown all the way from Florida to DC for my birthday. I managed to eat a 22-ounce ribeye steak all by myself. I went to the package room of my dorm building to beg the night shift worker to please hand over a package that my best friend had sent me in her name instead of mine.
On the night before my eighteenth birthday, I laughed and counted my blessings twice before going to bed.
On the morning of my eighteenth birthday, I woke up to a text from my roommates who let me know there was a surprise for me in the fridge. They bought me ice cream. Passion fruit mixed with another fruit I can’t remember. They did this because my boyfriend at the time told them it was my favorite. The ice cream was terrible. Like, pretty much inedible I would say. But it was a gesture that I am sure I will remember on my eighty-eighth birthday, seventy years down the line.
On my eighteenth birthday, in the confinement of my very own bedroom: a “privilege” most freshmen who live in college dorms do not receive, I wept. And it didn’t start on my eighteenth birthday. I spent the last forty-five days of my seventeenth year, each day since I left home and got to college, in my bedroom weeping, foreshadowing the many things that would come soon after.
My eighteenth year began in the thick of the affliction that was leaving home. And while you would think that having moved across an ocean only five years before that would’ve somehow made it easier or prepared me for it, that moving merely a couple of states and barely a thousand miles away would’ve been easy, I can only say that leaving your life behind gets harder and harder each time you do it.
Soon after the arrival of my eighteenth year, I experienced what felt like the most soul-crushing of heartbreaks. Not my first, but it was the type of heartbreak that made all the others feel like paper cuts next to a bullet hole. The type of heartbreak where losing love pales in comparison to losing your best friend in the world. And then, there I was — completely and utterly alone in a new, cold city.
Through that difficult time, I learned more about myself than ever before. I write this eulogy, on the very last hour of my eighteenth year, so that I may leave in the rearview the tragedies that it saw brutally come to life. I write this so that I can wake up tomorrow, on the morning of my nineteenth birthday, and remember only the good and put all else to rest.
eighteen lessons I learned while being eighteen
- Change is inevitable. And it hurts. There is no circumventing it, and there is no cheating it. You either show up at its door ready to push through or it finds you in a million silent and painful ways. The only way to face it is secure in the knowledge that the reward waiting for you on the other end of it is greater than both your temporary pain and whatever else you stand to lose.
- It is never too late to start again. It is never too late to apologize to the people you love, to apologize to yourself. I neglected so many objects that I loved because I was caught up in other temporary moments. In my darkest hour, it was exactly those objects–people and things–that got me through pain and metaphorical deaths to the other side of joy and life.
- There is so much love in friendship. People will tell you this, but until you have felt it in your own skin, you will not truly grasp the depths of it. Friends, differently from family, are people who you choose and who also got to choose you back. There is nothing tying you to them except a choice of love and loyalty. Nevertheless, your people show up. Regardless of your shortcomings and your flaws, they show up. Each and every day. And that, to me, is the love story that trumps all love stories.
- You can always go back home. In that same breath, home can be more than one place. I have come to realize that what I spent most of my teenage years considering a curse, is actually one of my life’s greatest gifts. I know wherever I am in the world now I will never be completely at home again. Because home will always be wherever my mom is. It will also be wherever my best friends are. Wherever my brother is. Wherever I’ve loved. Wherever I’ve left a piece of my heart.
- Art is healing. During the hardest time of my life, it was excruciating trying to find the words to explain the feeling of having my heart caving in on itself. It is a particular, earth-shattering type of pain that you can only know once you know it. Every time I stumbled across a poem, a song, a book, or anything that took exactly what I was feeling and painted it in a beautifully bitter light, I wept in relief. Because someone understood. I am not the first to know love and loss, and I wouldn’t be the first to survive it. I would like to thank a million times over every faceless artist that shined a light in my darkness. Your art matters.
- Love will always find you again. In ways you cannot even begin to imagine, in people you never thought you’d meet or who at first glance you would never guess could understand you as deeply as they do. In new places that you never thought you’d get to see. In new heights that you never imagined you could reach. In all the things that once seemed impossible, love makes them possible. It will also find you once more in the people who have always been next to you. In old places, you never thought you’d see again. In looking back on the first step of your journey of a thousand. In all the love you’ve always had in your life, even though maybe you couldn’t see it before, I promise you will now.
- Trying things you never thought you would do, will lead you to places you never thought you could go. When I graduated from my all-girl, catholic high school and moved states to attend a small, private university, I never imagined I would join a sorority, since I just left one. It proved to be one of the best decisions I ever made, the thing that kept me in DC, and a source of love, sisterhood, and friendship all in unquantifiable amounts.
- Healing is not linear and it has no timeline. It is something unimaginably painful, from one day to the next, to start making plans and imagining your life without a person you thought you would spend the rest of your days with. You don’t even notice how deeply your self-worth or identity is tied to someone until they’re gone and it feels like you’re falling into a dark, bottomless pit. But sure enough, one day at a time, the sun does shine on you again. And it is brighter than you remember it because this time it shines only for you.
- Happiness is achieved, in great part, by how much you can do for those who do everything for you. I find that when I pour all of my energy into myself, I become the best version of who I am for those who need me. Sometimes even the people you know the best are fighting internal battles you know nothing about. It might sound corny and my friends are definitely going to troll me for saying this but, you only need to change one person’s world to make the world at large a better place.
- Learn to enjoy your own company. You have to spend every second of every hour of the rest of your life with yourself. Get to know you. What you like, what moves your soul, what breaks your heart, and what puts it back together. Learn to love the parts of you you’re too scared to show anyone else. Your love story with yourself will become the precedent you set with any person who walks into your life; build that foundation with reinforced concrete.
- Your late teenage years (and I imagine also your twenties) is the time to be selfish. Each season of your life will present itself when the time is right. Don’t rush it. Travel, explore, learn, laugh, cry, love, lose, and try everything. See everything the world has to offer you before deciding what those things that you want forever are. The time to settle down and make compromises for others will come, but it is not now.
- If you truly, whole-heartedly believe the universe is conspiring in your favor, it will. Reep what you sow sort of thing. All the love you so freely give will find its way back to you, one way or another.
- Stop and smell the flowers. It’s in our human nature to always want more than what we have. Whenever I achieve something, I find I want to achieve more and more and more. And it is a good thing — to be ambitious. It is also healthy to stop and remember all the nights you spent praying for and working towards all that you are now. You are doing great. You are enough and you have the power within you to reach even the wildest of your dreams.
- Siempre cambias el amor de tu vida, por otro amor o por otra vida. You always change the love of your life, for another love or another life. Learn as much as you can from every single person that comes into your life. Appreciate with a grateful heart all those who stay and remember with an even more grateful heart all those who have left. You are a mosaic built on pieces of all the people you have loved and the people who have loved you. It is one of the most beautiful things about being human.
- Cry all that your heart desires. There is absolutely no use in trying to avoid going through the motions of your feelings. There is relief from facing your emotions head-on, feeling them with your whole being, and then letting them pass. Mostly because complex emotions, more often than not, will haunt you until you do so anyway. Feelings, for better or for worse, are all temporary. No hay mal que dure mil años. Roughly translated: There is no evil that can last a thousand years.
- If all else fails, go back to the places you were the happiest in. For me, that would be driving through Miami at night and up & down the Key Biscayne bridge with my best friends. I have known the highest of highs and lowest of lows in the same place. It is always there for me, an unpenetrable fortress in the face of any storm that has tried to bring it down. You will always find yourself in the places you left your heart in.
- People need people. The most important lesson of my life thus far. The one thing that will see you through the darkest, most horrible of times is your community. During what was probably the hardest year of my life—and if you know me, you know that’s saying a lot—my family and my friends more than anything else were what slowly but surely brought life back into me. I have learned so much about who I am, what I’m worth, and what I’m capable of by looking at myself through the eyes of the people I love and who I know to love me just the same.
As I say goodbye to eighteen, I recognize all the good that it brought into my life and all that it took away. No matter how much it hurt, I know now I’m infinitely better for it. As I close this eulogy I want to remind you all that there is no use in dying for the things that you love, it is better to simply live for them instead.
Here’s to nineteen.