No one can prepare you for your last day of childhood. Really, it’s an ambiguous day that comes at a different time for everyone. Mine hasn’t arrived yet but it feels like its looming nearer with every word I write and every day I spend at college. I was never sure what to expect from high school. I didn’t know whether it was supposed to be the best time of my life or the worst. I spent my four years wondering if I was cool, if I was popular, or if I should even care about either.

Now that high school is over, I feel like I can come away from the situation with clarity. I can say confidently that high school was neither the best or the worst time of my life. I’ll say this in the least cynical way I possibly can because nothing about this realization I’ve come to is sad: for me, high school was been a beautiful collection of lasts. It was a compilation of moments—some sad and awkward and some so positively ecstatic that I would relive them over and over in my mind for a thousand years until they expire as the stars that light up the ceiling of my mind. I had my moments of questioning why on earth anyone puts up with social construct that is high school and I had moments where I looked around at my friends piled in the car with me and thanked some higher power for bringing such excellent people and D-Block study hall adventures into my life.

But when I think back on my time in high school I won’t remember it with one emotion—there’s no way I could possibly fit all my feelings about what high school has been for me into one thought, sentence, graduation speech, or article. If you had asked me the week before graduation if I was ready to leave I would have said, “I’ve been ready to graduate since the day I started ninth grade.” But in the past eight months since I graduated, I’ve learned that leaving is a little more complicated than I thought. The beginning of college brought a whole new world to my attention. I learned I had to look to myself for guidance instead of relying on my parents and that I knew a lot less about myself than I thought. In the first semester of college, I would have days where I wanted nothing more than to see my friends from my hometown and walk down the halls of my school with familiar faces all around me.

As challenging as high school was sometimes, now I can appreciate it so much more. Nothing good comes easy and finding such wonderful friends and mentors in a place as tough as high school was extraordinary. There are beautiful moments I’ll forever associate with that time and successes that defined high school as somewhere that was exceptionally difficult but ultimately gave me strength, understanding, and friends that feel like family. The truth is that each last I experienced opened the door for me to start fresh and make the next four years about firsts.

I’m now almost finished with my freshman year of college and finally I’m beginning to understand how lucky I was to be surrounded by such amazing people. It is because of the strong friendships I have back home that I am able to make new friendships here at school and it is because of the solid foundation I built in high school that I have had such a smooth and graceful transition out of childhood and into independence and adulthood.