High school is over! Congrats on your graduation (soon), my fellow high school friends!

You survived the lockers, the no-phone policies, the heavy textbooks, the SAT, ACT, and benchmark exams. High school might have felt like the best or maybe the worst years of your life, but be excited because you are now going to college! For the high school grads reading this, you did well.

I hope as you graduate, you leave with no regrets.

You made mistakes, you had arguments, and you got hurt, but look back and see how these challenges defined you.

As you go into college, high school will be a blur, unless you had a unique experience like myself, and went to a different school every year, plus the fact that sophomore year and junior year was in South Korea, but other than that soon the memories will seem so long ago.

The long nights that you spent studying for the SAT/ACT, and even the young, high school relationships that you had will all seem like a small part of your life because now, you are going to college.

Most likely, no one will know you in college, that is if you are going somewhere far. It's a fresh start and there will be excitement as well as anxiety as you enter this lifestyle of complete responsibility. But you will learn to love being treated like an adult and figuring out things by yourself.

There is true growth as you graduate high school.

You have a summer to spend before starting school again, and I want to advise you to spend it with those you love. You won't be seeing familiar faces every day now but there will be people who will still keep in contact with you.

Spend time with those people. High school friends are crucial to have and although college will change you guys, high school friends will be like home. They will know who you were as a high schooler and sometimes, the reminders will be calming to you.

Spend time with your close high school friends. And don't forget to spend time with your family. Their support will continue throughout college and it will mean a lot to them to know you are grateful for them.

And lastly, good job graduates! High school is definitely an interesting one, trying to figure out where you want to go to college and literally studying your butt off so you can even go to a college (if that is what you want to do after).

The search for what you are interested in, what you like, or even who you are will continue even in college so don't worry about that.

You just graduated (aka survived) high school!

Go celebrate!