Hello My Love,
I know you are probably wincing at the way I opened this letter. What a cringy, arrogant way to refer to one’s own self, especially as craft words that will not be yours to relish alone. But bear with me as I give you a glimpse into the torrential, wonderful journey that awaits you, and I think you’ll soon understand why I have grown to speak in this way.
Your heart bustles with excitement right now. You cruise through your senior year, content in the satisfaction that you made it. Getting to college means freeing yourself from a childhood fraught with the difficulties of discovering who you were meant to be in this big, big world.
It means tasting the freedom of finally being able to be yourself, no longer fixating on the perpetual struggle of being enough for everyone around you. And finally, it means relishing a glimpse of boundless freedom, the freedom to manage your own time and to make your own decisions without caving to a cacophony of voices hissing in your ears at all times.
But, you must remember that life is just beginning.
You stand on a high point, marveling at how far you have come, but as you gaze at what lies before you, you soon realize that you toe the edge of a cliff overlooking a world filled with daunting unknown realities.
You will know it is time to start anew.
I know you love your family deeply. And your friends deeply. And the life that you have made for yourself, here, at the place you have come to call home.
I know it hurts like a knife piercing through you to leave home — you will be in shambles not because you will never see these people again but because when you do, you know that nothing will ever be the same again.
But as your dad will tell you, you have to go. Even as your face is buried in his chest and you're sobbing, whispering through soggy breaths that you don't want to go. This means you have to let go of what you have come to know as your world.
Because as you will soon realize, to grow up and become who you were meant to be and not merely someone’s child, someone’s friend, or someone’s sibling, you have to do life on your own.
You have to wake up alone, to the shrill shriek of your alarm instead of the warm call from downstairs telling you that school starts in twenty minutes.
You have to eat alone, learning to be content in your own company and realizing that it is not shameful to have moments in your life when you alone are enough for yourself.
You have to spend moments of your free time alone, acclimatizing to the beauty of silence and the swelling call of your own thoughts.
You have to cry alone, patting your own head to ease the ache in your heart and wiping your own tears when you don’t know anyone enough to share your pain with them.
You have to fall sick alone, mustering the courage to get up from bed, even when everything hurts, and do your laundry, because if you don’t, no one else will.
You have to go to the doctor alone, nodding along as they rapidly utter jargon that flies over your head and figure out what the jumble of numbers that they hand to you at the end of your visit means.
I can’t promise that it will be easy, as you discover what it means to live life on your own, without the constant net of your family, as you realize that every fairytale that you heard and loved was nothing but wisps of lie-filled breaths and that there is no Prince Charming who is going to walk into your life and fix everything when it falls apart.
In fact, I know that it won’t be easy. It will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. And you’ll want to go home, and question why you ever came here in the first place, and wonder why your dream seems like they’re turning into a nightmare, and you’ll want to quit.
But you won’t.
When everything goes wrong, you will wake up with the belief that tomorrow has to be a better day.
When your heart craves to be held, your hands will find the family that you were meant to find along the way, and they will hold you.
When you can only find reasons to frown, you will find joy in the small moments that you never anticipated in the first place.
Adult life isn’t a highlight reel of no bedtimes, no boundaries, and endless exciting new opportunities.
It’s the nights that you have such deep conversations, you lose track of all time. It’s the walks back from late events, where you laugh at the distance that lies before you, glad for those who surround you. It’s the dinners that you have every day, eating with those who make silence feel comfortable.
As you move through this life, you will grow into the kind of love that lasts a lifetime: the love that you have for yourself.
This life that awaits you, it’s wonderful most times. Sometimes, it’s terrible. Yet even in the moments you never want to live again, it is you who has to choose to make them beautiful.
You have to pull yourself through them. You have to choose to be better for it, to be stronger for it, and when you do, you’ll realize that it wasn’t so hard after all.
And that even though you’ve made it, here too, life begins again.
Until then,
Cheering you on forever,
You, one day soon.
Advikaa Anand is a Trinity freshman. Her columns typically run on alternate Thursdays.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.
Advikaa Anand is a Trinity sophomore and an opinion managing editor of The Chronicle's 119th volume.