Dear Freshman Annalise,
I speak to you from the threshold of the next door. It’s the night before I graduate, and four of my dearest friends are sitting in the center of a room torn apart by attempts to pack. We’re full of Frosties and fries from Wendy’s, exchanging stories and laughing. These girls have been by my side since freshman year, and it brings me back to thoughts of you-- You, the person I once was. Looking back at the past three years, everything that has happened makes sense. The changes are clear. But for you, the future is still shrouded in misty uncertainty. We have that in common.
You’ll learn a lot about yourself in the coming days. You’re a physical touch person. You’re an Enneagram Two (It will take you a long time to learn what that means). You will hug every single person you possibly can. You will find that you are in a place where you are free to be your effervescent and encouraging self. (Your RD will write those words on a mug and make them into a title that you proudly bear.)
You will break. You will love and love and love, and not only will people not reciprocate that, but they will not accept it. Some days you will offer the world the worst of you, and you’ll hate it. You will learn that you can be bitter, and you can be angry, and you can swear. You will recognize the feeling of your heart clenching up in frustration, and you’ll resent it. You’ll hurt the people around you. That is the worst feeling of all.
But you will learn to heal from all these things. You will feel like you’ve aged ten years in a single week, and you will want to give up. But you won’t. You’ll realize that a broken heart is like a broken bone—it has to heal straight, or it must be re-broken. You’ll realize the importance of feeling everything. It’ll hurt. But you’ll do it.
You have the greatest friends in the world. You know the strongest, gentlest, goofiest men and women in the world. One friend you’ll meet while running to Orientation, another you’ll meet over Twitter, and then it’ll turn out that she’ll be your RA. There will be the friends who just kind of appear in your life, and you’ll wonder how you got by without them. There will be the friends who are made just by making faces during a long and strange organ solo. There will be the friends who bring you mac and cheese and watch weird kids’ TV shows with you. There will be the roommates who become sisters, the goofballs who become brothers, and the friends that you cry with, friendships you sense will long outlast your college years. The closeness you will feel will overwhelm you and fill you with wonder. There will be the hard days where you will fail them, and difficult conversations will be had. There will be the glorious days where the home-friends and the school-friends will be in the same place, and those labels will go out the window and there will only be friends surrounding you. The old friendships will strengthen, and the new friendships will bind themselves to you and never let you go. You will delight in seeing your two worlds colliding.
Jesus will be with you. He will love you through your mistakes. He will speak in the kindest ways and the smallest moments. Your faith will feel raw and real but will waste away to what feels like nothing before you can bat an eye. You will fear that he is not with you. Don’t listen. Please, don’t listen.
I love this college-- these grounds, these classrooms (even the ones without windows), these workers and faculty and students. I love our scrappiness, our unwillingness to roll over and give up. We fight so hard every day, sometimes arm-in-arm against the world, sometimes with our fists balled threateningly in each other’s faces. But we are not afraid of the mess that comes with a difficult conversation. I love our pursuit of peace, whether that is world peace or campus-wide peace or peace within ourselves. I love our love of the woods, of singing the Doxology a capella, our emphasis on community. This has been a good home to lay my head in.
You might not feel like you will ever fit. You are just a freshman, after all. You’re goofy and joyful and a little awkward sometimes. Looking back, I see that you were finding your feet and gaining your balance. I am not ashamed to say that I was you once. You already love so well, and you're learning more about how to love every day. You are a seeker, ferociously sniffing out a deeper relationship with Jesus. Your decisions are my decisions, and I wouldn’t change them for anything. You set the foundation for me to learn about healing and grieving. You are the base of the person I am, and I am so grateful for everything we’ve been through. You are very loved, Freshman Annalise. There is so much goodness ahead, for both of us.
Today, I’m crossing the stage and flipping my tassel. I’m opening a new chapter to this story that we share.
I hope you can look at me and be proud of who we are becoming. I know I am.
Love,
Annalise