I’d like to begin by being completely transparent with you. Although I’ve always been good at finding the brightside, I’ve never quite been able to escape the dreaded feeling of change.
Most military children you talk to will tell you that moving around often made them great at making new friends and incredibly adaptable. Some of them might even tell you they loved the constant moves and adventure. For me… it was a nightmare. Every time we’d pack up a house, say goodbye to our friends and community, and prepare to start over somewhere else, I would feel sick with the thought of never returning to that season of life ever again. I would look around at the empty rooms and recall fond memories, wishing things could just stay the same. The feeling would actually eat me alive.
Well, I’m 22 now and I still haven’t outgrown the gnawing ache in my chest at the thought of any kind of change at all. Call it pre-nostalgia, but I find myself living in the present day thinking about how much I’m going to miss it when it’s all gone. I know, it sounds silly, but it’s true.
Just the other day I walked out of my last college class, a truthfully anticlimactic event, and walked back to my car in a bit of a daze. Just like that, a major part of my life was over, things were going to change. As if triggered by the shutting of my car door, the waterworks began. I drove home sobbing, remembering all my favorite moments from the last four years. I reminisced on how much had already changed, and how much was still going to change in the coming months of adulthood.
People I had become accustomed to seeing every day would be in different cities and states in a matter of weeks, and maybe I’d never even see them again. Professors I saw more than my own family would just become connections on LinkedIn who I’d catch up with from time to time. Classrooms I’d once spent countless hours of my life in, I’d never step foot in again after this.
I really couldn’t help but wonder if everyone else was feeling this embarrassingly emotional, or if it was just me dreading all the change to come.
Don’t get me wrong, I am SO excited to graduate. But as an incredibly emotional person, I can never really experience one emotion without it being accompanied by a handful of others. I can’t feel all this joy about graduation without a little pang of sadness for the end of a really sweet time in my life. But I guess it may not be such a bad thing? I guess it’s really just a reflection that the experiences I had, and the people I met made this such a bittersweet goodbye.
Now here’s the brightside this blog has promised you… I just know there is so much good to still come for me. There are new opportunities, friendships, and experiences to be had, and I’m quite positive they will all be worth this dreaded change. But I think I will always be the girl who leaves pieces of her heart in the past.
