Eighteen years. For the last eighteen years we’ve lived a relatively routine life. Fall means school, Friday night lights, picking out your Halloween costume, and Thanksgiving break. Winter means gift giving season, basketball games, movie marathons, and Hot Chocolate. Then comes spring, warm weather peeking through while you stress over getting your grades up. Anxiously waiting for the three months of freedom. There it is. Summer is a season full of happiness and warmth. You drive out to the newest hang out spot, do some hiking, jump off cliffs with your best friends, eat sandwiches and juice boxes like little kids, walk back to the car silent out of pure exhaustion, and do it again the next day. And once summer is over, you start the cycle all over again.

But not this time.

This time it’s different. This time we’re not going back to the same school with the same people and the same familiar shortcuts to class. This time we’re trying something new. And by this point we’re meant to crave that. We’re meant to be done with high school and the petty people and the small town gossip. We’re meant to want something more.

So who in the hell writes a love letter to high school?

High school is four years of classes you hate, exhausting homework, and the same routine over and over again for (give or take) a thousand days.

A thousand days in my ratty, crumbling, cockroach infested high school, and I am writing a damn love letter?

Yes.

Because love is joyful and jubilant, but it is painful and miserable. Love makes you angry. Love makes you excited. Love spikes your adrenaline and it knocks the wind out of you. Love is exhausting. Love is kind. Love is long and short all at the same time.

Kind of like high school.

This may seem extreme; but in the last four years I’ve felt all of those feelings listed above and more, so if I were to choose one word to describe high school it would be love.

Not everyone has the same experience with high school, that I know. But I do know if you’re still reading, I hope you can find a sliver of relatability in my words. Because this week, many of us are waving goodbye to our hometowns, the places we planted roots and grew up in.

When you enter Kindergarten, you’re terrified. Who will you be friends with in class? Where will you sit at lunch? Will you have anyone to play with at recess?

And then you meet someone. The girl who sits next to you and offers you her goldfish. You stand in the lunch line together and play gravel at recess every day after.

So maybe you are friends with her for the next thirteen years, maybe you fight and grow apart, or maybe in your final year of high school, you reconnect.

That is the beauty of friendship.

And if your first eighteen years were like mine, you went through many friendships. I felt like I had to be friends with everyone, and if someone didn’t like me, I had to fix it.

That brings me to life lesson #1 I learned in my childhood: you can’t please everyone.

Seventeen years I spent overthinking unnecessary drama in big friend groups, being insecure, and praying I left high school with no bad blood.

It’s high school for God sakes, everyone is dramatic. People are mean. And everyone….yes everyone talks shit. It’s how life is in a small town.

Life lesson #2: GET OVER IT

The next best thing I learned was to just dust it off my shoulders. Who cares what she said about me! I mean, no one is perfect, I’ve said my fair share of gossip. So if I can dish it out, I’ve gotta take it. Maybe not the best advice, but just trying to be realistic here.

Life lesson #3: Don’t waste your time

As a freshman, you’re entering a new chapter of your life. Most people are scared about something. Meeting friends, intimidating classes, or keeping up with this change. But the one part no one even thinks about, is one of the first things they say at freshman orientation.

Time flies by.

Granted, someone will tell you that in every new chapter of your life. But let that click now. If you’re reading this as a freshman, senior in college, or you have a full time job with three kids.

Time will fly by.

It’s not a scary thing. What makes life so special if we had unlimited time? Start to appreciate the days you’re living. Even the thousand days you’re in high school, thinking you have to do the same routine everyday.

You don’t.

Yes, you have to wake up at 6:30 in the morning, snooze your alarm, finally get up, go to school, go to practice or work, do homework, and go to bed. Every day.

But they don’t tell you about the stuff in between do they? The walks to class laughing about how the ceiling panels could fall on top of you at any moment. Getting your teacher distracted and talking for the first twenty minutes of class. The drive to Chipotle during lunch with friends. They are small moments that often get overlooked.

Routines are good, but they get stale. Not fresh!

So freshen up your day.

Introduce yourself to that girl next to you in Algebra class.

Try a new sport or join a new club.

Make conversation with your teachers.

Mix it up a little. I promise you won’t regret it.

Senior year I brought back a club to my high school, Fashion club. Probably one of the best things I ever pursued. I made new friends and new memories I’ll cherish.

Of course there is one downside to all of this advice, it makes leaving that much harder.

But wouldn’t it suck more if you didn’t have anyone to say goodbye to? I’d rather have it sting for a little, knowing a piece of my heart will forever be in my town.

So yes, this is the end of a decade (almost two), but in the wise words of a young poet named Taylor Swift, it is a start of an age.

I’ll be screaming Long Live to an era of my life that gifted me with wonderful friends and shaped who I am as a person.

I truly hope if you are reading this with tears in your eyes as you part ways with your people, that you know you’ll always find your way back home. Wherever that is. Maybe it is your hometown, or maybe it’s not a place at all. Maybe home is the people that fill up your heart and squeeze it so tight it is impossible to let go of.

But please let go. Home will always be there.

Let go and explore this next chapter of you life, so you can scream Long Live to that one in a few years.

Ditch your routine life and mix it up.

Work hard for the goals that seem like pipe dreams.

And take my advice…or don’t.

But I’m rooting for all of you. Go live a life you could write a love letter for.

xoxo, megs