An Open Letter to a Me I Don't Yet Know

Dear Cookie of 2018,

So you made it through undergrad! (Or maybe you flunked a year, or dropped out to join the circus. Congrats regardless!)

Right now, on the cusp of college (I hope you still love alliteration - if not, please don't think of your 17-year old incarnation as lame), I'm beginning to feel a certain... lightness bubbling up in me. The soda that was high school has grown flat and uninteresting (and remains chock-full of sugar), while a gleaming flute of champagne beckons from Cambridge.

(Don't forget that the legal drinking age is 21 in the States.)

And now I have to wonder what you're like, the champagne flute empty before you as you step away from four, hopefully transformative years.

Are you feeling similar anxiety as you step onward to medical school? Or maybe a different branch of graduate studies, or has that been tossed aside for a jump straight into the work force? Maybe you found love. I'm sure you found friends. Is parting from them as bittersweet as it is now?

I'm a lot of things right now. Anxious and excited. Young and hungry, but hesitant too. It's probably less scary for you now, or maybe even worse? I hope not worse.

...

Reading this, you might wonder: "Did I stay true to my 17-year old self?"

And I know I'm still largely a naive dummy. I've seen so little of the world, and I understand so little of myself and others. So all I ask you to reflect upon right now, all that I hope for myself in the next four years is this:

Keep moving, growing, changing, learning. I'm feeling sad now that an epoch is coming to an end, but I recently realized that there's nothing sad about it. The past can't be changed (as much as that is both a curse and a blessing). The sweet memories and friendship that exist now, will continue to have existed in the future, even if... they fall apart in the time to come. There's no predicting what's to come.

This is real. Right now these friends, this home, this set of beliefs and ideas, they're my life, and soon they'll just be another set of stories trailing behind me.

So Cookie, now 21-years old (and finally able to drink legally), who's the new me? Does she still believe that, and does she still live, teaching herself to embrace change? I can't wait to meet her.

-cookielime