A Letter To Myself

Dear past self,

Aching hearts, tear filled eyes, and a wanting to go home. This will be your experience with moving. I know this because this was mine. Moving for most college students means the happiest time of their lives. It's the time where they finally have the freedom they have been longing for since middle school. For most students, it means late-night parties, being able to eat and do whatever they want, and starting their own lives as young adults; however, the process of packing away our entire childhood life into a few boxes was not easy for me. The day I told our parents my plan to move was the first day I saw our father cry.

As you know already, through funerals of deceased relatives to watching wholesome movies as a family, I never once saw him shed a single tear. But the thought of his little girl leaving him brought up feelings that he had never shown me before. The saddest part about it was that I felt the same way. We grew up in an amazing home. Surrounded by the warmth of love and the exciting feeling of a new adventure, we could have never asked for a better childhood. We were lucky. This was why moving away was so hard for me. While it was the next step in our life that needed to be taken, it was hard to give up the only life I knew. You will have to say goodbye to drinking coffee while watching the news with our parents, to arguing with our brother over something stupid, to family movie nights, to late-night political talks with our father over ice cream. Everything that made that house a home.

"Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving": These are the wise words of AlbertEinsteinthat I now live by. These were the words that pushed me to sign the lease on our first apartment. It wasn't that I wanted to move; it was that I needed to move. It is crucial to break through the shelter that our parents built for us. We as children must see and experience the world through our own eyes, not the lens that our childhood crafted.

So here is to you, my past self. I know you will be scared. I know that you will cry the first two weeks after the move; however, I also know how you will blossom. How you will find your place in this scary world, we live in. How much you will grow as a person. And how you did all this with the help of only yourself. Take the jump! Make a move!