Dear Maddie, 

In your freshman year of college, you will endure two semesters far from the idyllic year you imagined. 

They will hurt, and they will break you.

You will turn 19 and wish you could simply have a do-over. 

As you expect, the do-over never comes. 

Instead, you will sit with the deep-seated guilt and intense betrayal for longer than you hope. 

You will try to pinpoint the exact moment things went wrong, where you became a bad friend and so naive that you couldn’t tell fact from fiction. You never do. You just know that it happened. 

You will find yourself playing back moments in your head as you fall asleep, wondering how you can care so deeply and others be so careless with your heart. You never find the answer, and you never will – and maybe that’s a good thing. 

The truth might be too much to bear. 

As summer 2023 nears and a new school year commences, you convince yourself that you’re “over it,” that you’ve moved on. You haven’t. You’re dying inside. 

It will take several sessions of talk therapy over two school years before you discover that all roads lead back to that dark point in time. You will struggle to forgive yourself for your own wrongdoing, even as you know now what you didn’t know then. 

Eventually, you come to understand two things can be true at the same time. You will forgive yourself in hindsight but hold yourself accountable for the emotional pain you inflicted, knowing no excuse exists.

Finding inner-closure comes slow, but it does. 

As your senior year closes, you will accept that first year for what it is — a damning reflection of yourself — and see the role it has served as the catalyst for the woman you’ve become. 

You fess up to your mistakes more readily now and take extreme ownership of your actions, even when it’s hard. You’ve learned to trust what you think and how you feel, instead of letting others tell you what and how you should. You finally stick up for yourself and stand tall instead of shrinking.

Most importantly, your emotional intelligence has grown, and you’ve equipped yourself with the tools to nourish it. 

You are proud of the woman you’ve become and as you navigate each day, you seek to be better than you were the day before.

In your freshman year of college, you will endure two semesters far from the idyllic year you imagined. At the time, they will hurt you and they will break you, but at 22, they will serve as an important reminder: where you started and how far you’ve come. 

With grace, 

Yourself, aged 22