It’s very difficult to put into words the way I feel towards my boarding school. Whenever people find out I went away for high school, their immediate assumption is that I did something wrong and was sent away against my will. This could not be further from the truth.

I decided I wanted to go to boarding school when I was in 6th grade. My parents, teachers and basically anyone I told assumed I wouldn’t actually go through with it, and that it was just an idea that would never actually be put into place. However, I knew from the moment I stepped on campus that this was the place where I wanted to be. When I left for school at age 14, I felt completely confident and excited. My dream that I had been nurturing for years had finally come to fruition. In retrospect, I was a baby. On the day my mom dropped me off, I could never have fathomed the experiences I was to have over the next four years, and the immense ways in which I would grow.

My boarding school provided a breathtaking background for the journey I was to take over the course of my time there. The same brick and ivy-clad buildings in which my grandfather learned before me would stand sentinel over the days when I was happier than I could imagine, and the days where I could barely hold myself together.

My school was the scene in which I first experienced heartbreak, what it felt like to finally get the lead role in a play, what it truly meant to make a friend and lose them and what it felt like to feel helpless. While my mom wasn’t there to parent me up-close, my school provided teachers that loved me like their own children. While most high school students’ relationships with their teachers don’t generally go beyond the classroom, mine went to the extent that my close teachers knew the very makeup of my spirit and soul. These were the adults that watched me grow and transform into the person I am today.

One of the most difficult parts about boarding school is that you don’t get to go “home” at the end of the day. If I was in a bad mood or frustrated, I had to resort to locking myself away from the 20 other girls on my dorm hall and trying to maintain a semblance of privacy. When you screw up at boarding school, everyone knows before the day is over. Add in the trials and tribulations of high school and teenage angst into the mix, and you are left with nothing but the inevitability of drama and emotions to the extreme.

At school, I found friends that knew me like a sister because I lived with them. The girls in your dorm quickly become your family, and my freshman year hallway was where I found the two girls that are going to be my bridesmaids, the girls who were there through my highest highs and my lowest of lows. While we’re all in separate states now, they will forever be my closest friends.

There are very few ways in which I could properly thank my boarding school. Deerfield, thank you for harboring a very young, very lost little girl when my family was at its worst. Thank you for opening my mind to different cultures and people. Thank you for the beautiful faculty and students you surrounded me with. Thank you for the learning experiences, as painful as they were to go through. Thank you for watching me grow up over four years. Most of all, thank you for being the place I will always call my home.