It’s the final stretch of one of the most influential times of your entire life. This is it, you have only a few months left until you go out into the world on your own, whether it be college, getting your own apartment, joining the forces, or working full time. In the next few months, everything you once knew will change, some for the better, some for the worse, but change will come whether you are ready for it or not. Someday, you’ll look back on it all and wish you had realized how important it all was, and how much every second counts.

Senior year is almost over and you won’t ever experience anything like it again. Senior year of college will be an entirely different experience, you won’t be in your home, you won’t have your family and childhood friends there to experience it all with you, and you will have a completely different perspective of the world by that point. Senior year is your last time to be a child, because after graduation: everything you have learned for the past 13 years will be your guidelines on how to live a successful and exciting life.

Senior year is the time for making mistakes and learning from them. Go ahead and stay up too late to watch that show, spend your last $30 to go to a concert with your best friends, go to your school events: sports games, dinners, and dances. Have sleepovers and movie nights: eat junk food and stay up all night gossiping. Listen to your music extra loud and wear whatever you want!

Take tons of pictures and make memories that will live with you forever. This is the time for singing your favorite song: no matter who’s around. It’s the time to dance like no one is watching, because years from now: you’ll realize, that no one was. It’s the time to enjoy all of the corny jokes your family makes, enjoy the way the traffic light at the corner takes forever to change to green, which results in longer radio jam sessions with your friends, and enjoy the little things about your hometown.

These next few months will fly by, you’ll find yourself wishing for it all to be over with, senioritis will hit (if it hasn’t already) and you will be counting down the days until you can walk out those doors for the very last time. But it will go a lot faster than you think it is going, soon it will be the last day of school and the next thing you know: you’ll be standing next to your closest friends graduating from the place you have called home for the last four years.

So, take a breath, sit back, and don’t take it for granted. Senior year will be something that lives with you forever, whether it be the smallest memory of making a new friend, or the immeasurable feeling that overcomes you, when you cross the stage. Senior year is something you’ve been looking forward to since you walked through those doors four years ago, and now, it’s almost over. So, cherish these last few months, live them to your absolute fullest, because as a certain “Raven” once said:

“It’s the oldest story in the world. One day you’re seventeen and planning for someday. And then quietly and without you ever really noticing, someday is today, and that someday is yesterday, and this is your life.”

So, make your someday, today.