Dear College Freshman Veronica,

The enormity of what you’re about to do has probably not hit you yet. You’re still reeling from that letter that you received, telling you you’ll get the scholarship that will allow you to go to a private Christian Liberal Arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Your siblings are still jumping up and down in excitement (they think they'll get your room), your mom is still crying with joy. And you’re frozen still, barely able to take everything in.

The fact that you, a Mexican immigrant living in South Texas, are about to go to college in Michigan, where winter is brutal and you don’t know a soul where you’re going, won’t hit you over the next few weeks because you’re getting ready to graduate. You’re preparing your Salutatorian speech with nerves that wake you up at night. You’re trying to soak up every last moment with the five best friends that, until now, still take up huge chunks of your heart. You’re saying goodbye to your teachers, to high school, and you’re also getting ready for prom.

You’ll still be numb to the reality of college when your flight gets delayed in Chicago and you have to spend the night there with your family. You’ll leave your journal at the hotel and it will finally be mailed to you two years later. You’ll get swept up in the frenzy of orientation in what will be the most exhausting and overwhelming week of your life. You have never met as many people from different ethnicities and countries as you will that week.

Let me tell you when it will finally hit you. You’ll be in a classroom with all the international students, taking an insulting English test even though you went to high school in the States. Your phone will be vibrating all through that test and you’ll finish quickly and go outside to check it, only to see a lot of calls from your parents telling you that they had to go catch their flight, and you’ll stare at your phone, catatonic, because the glorified moment, that college goodbye that you saw in so many movies, never happened to you. And you’ll suddenly realize, with your family, your home, your stability gone, that you’re completely alone now.

Except, throughout the next few weeks, you’ll realize you won’t be alone. You will meet so many people who are genuinely interested in you having a good transition into college. Your orientation leader will become one of the best people you’ve ever met as he continues to check up on you and your orientation group for the rest of the year. Your RA is going to be a spunky girl who saves you and your whole floor from a spontaneous fire at 3 am. Your roommate’s grumpy face will scare the crap out of you the first two weeks, and there’ll be an agonizing silence in which the two of you won’t know how to communicate. But you'll choose everyday to love her, and through her you'll learn that love is a choice more than it is a feeling, at least at first, but that it is the best choice ever. Through days of uncertainty and social anxiety, there will finally come a day in which you two bond over Pride and Prejudice, the Keira Knightley version, and you’ll become the best of friends. Your life will be better because of her. Your suite mates are going to be your good friends, and one of them will become your soul sister.

You have always been a solitary person, an introvert, but Veronica, you’ll need these people so much for the months that follow. The winter will be hard, one of the hardest the state has ever seen, your first Michigan winter. The first snowfall of your life will arrive one Wednesday afternoon, when you come out of your English Lit class. You will love your classes and professors but they will be tough work. You will get sick, develop food intolerances that suck. You will come to know the reality of depression and anxiety. There will be a week in which you get your very first panic attack. You’ll wake up at night, unable to breathe, and for many nights, your mom will be with you on the phone, until you’re at the threshold of falling asleep.

You will feel truly alive, you will feel the sharp edges of growing up as much as the thrill of true and enduring friendship.

You’ll also develop a huge crush on your Economics tutor and you won’t get over him until sophomore year, so to save you the awkwardness, let me tell you, HE LIKES MONSTER TRUCKS. Enough said, girl! Walk away!

You’ll change your major four times before you finally find something you’re passionate about.

But this is what will really throw you off balance: you will change.

Physically, you will gain thirty pounds, develop body image issues, and slowly lose the weight as you learn about health and what’s good for your body, but sadly, you’ll still have to deal with a lot of body image issues that came with change. You’ll have to learn how to embrace these changes.

Mentally, you’ll want to be the academic darling you were in high school, the one with the straight A’s and overachieving, workaholic tendencies. You’ll miss the recognition you secretly enjoyed from your teachers and peers. There will be days in college when you feel like you’re nobody. Like your hard work doesn’t matter, like it’s going by unnoticed, like you were never anything special or important. Although this might crush you, it will make you see that those awards in your room back home never mattered. The grades on that report card, while they got you a good scholarship, won’t really matter now, either.

Here’s what will matter: when it’s 12 am and you’re exhausted but you still have a lot to study and you’ll realize you haven’t developed good time-management skills. When a friend has thoughts of self-hatred and self-injury and you don’t know what to do, and you keep saying all the wrong things. When a friend's mom passes away from breast cancer and her pain guts you and you feel helpless to comfort her but you desperately wish you could. When you’re ashamed to ask for help but you really need it. When you have to confront your friends and you don’t know how to start. When you are so homesick your stomach hurts but you’re learning to form a new family in college. Whether you become a person who knows how to love these people well or not is what will measure your success.

Finally, you’ll change spiritually. You’ll go from an evangelizing Christian who thinks she has all the answers and defends God like he needs a lawyer, to a person who learns to abide in the discomfort of not knowing things. You’ll go from a person afraid to ask questions because she’s afraid to challenge her beliefs to a person who wrestles with Scripture constantly. You’ll go from a person who tiptoes around a God she perceived to be easily angered and easily offended, to an honest madwoman who pounds on the chest of a big God with a big heart, a madwoman who cries out to him with hard questions and a broken heart, knowing he will not hide his face from her, but he will reveal himself to her.

You will make mistakes. You will hurt your good friends in your clumsy attempts at relationships. You will seek the approval of your professors only to be disappointed when they don’t give it to you. When you go back home, you will act superior to your family, thinking you know so much, angry that they don’t know the things you’ve learned. Over the years, you’ll mellow out and understand that love is more important than being right, and that your parents are wise beyond their years, wiser than you.

Your relationship with your family will change. Your heart will break every single time you think of your little sister. She’s the person you want to be when you grow up and it will hurt you to miss out on her achievements. Your relationship with your brother gets better, just when you thought that day might never come. You understand your parents more. You see them more and more as the human beings they are, flawed, and yet you admire them all the more, because being human, they took on the near-impossible task of marriage and raising a family in another country. And they’ve done a good job; we could never do half as well as they did.

Your new relationships will boggle you.

You’ll be surrounded by a troupe of strong, vibrant women who will make you think all women are superheroes, Valkyries in disguise.

You’ll learn a thing or two about boys, and they will still baffle you greatly.

But you'll meet these boys:

And this little fella:

You will also develop a heart for justice, for gender equality, and environmental issues (can you believe it?!) You will get a cleaning job and a tutor job on-campus and meet amazing people, and you will also get an internship at a clinic that will fuel your passion for health and racial equality.

Inevitably, there will come a time in which you’ll feel like you did in elementary school, when all your friends were getting their periods but you weren’t, and you worried. Because in your third year, three of your best friends will get engaged and you’ll cry for days, because you’re happy for them, but also because you'll fear losing them (and because you're emotional, okay?).

I am about to start my senior year. It didn’t feel like three years have gone by. And I wish there was a future Veronica writing me a letter, telling me everything’s going to be okay. Because I worry about this school year. Will my grades be enough? Will my energy abound for all that I have to do? What schools will I apply to? Will I go to graduate school right after graduation, or should I get a full-time job instead? Will my visa even get renewed? What if it doesn’t? Will I be able to find a job from a company that’s willing to sponsor an international student? Is there even a future for me in this country?

I have so many questions and anxieties.

But looking back at everything you’ll endure, Veronica, I am amazed by it. I look back at eighteen-year-old you and you are so meager and frail, you look like a gust of wind will break you. How did you make it all the way here? How did you endure three years of college away from your family, your friends? How are you still here?

I still don’t know. You had a lot of help from friends and family and God. There were so many things that could’ve gone wrong and didn’t. So many things that went wrong and God turned them into good things. So I know you definitely didn’t do this alone. But I hope that whatever strong stuff was beneath your weakly exterior is enough to get me through what’s coming.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you—develop good ways to manage your time. Don’t be afraid to pursue what you’re passionate about. Don’t take Chinese as your minor, take Creative Writing instead. We’ll regret it forever if you don’t. Put people over things. Love openly, even when you’re irritated or stressed. People are the ones who matter.

Be honest with God. He can take it.

You can play it safe and go to your community college, but let me tell you, in three years, they’ll take your major off their program, so I hope you don’t go there.

Now I have to ask you—knowing that you’ll go through all of this, will you still choose to leave home for college?

If I could, I’d choose coming here all over again. I hope you do too.

With love (and a little bit of concern),

Senior Veronica

PS: Thank your amazing mentor for inspiring this letter. She will believe in you when you won’t believe in yourself. And she’ll move away on your last year in college, so go see her very often while she’s still here! You will miss her dearly even before she leaves.