Thank you, sophomore year.

As I am about two weeks (in denial) from closing my sophomore year of college, I have a couple of regards I feel I should make towards this year. To be completely honest, my sophomore year topped my freshman year by 200,000 times. Okay, maybe I’m being a little dramatic. Maybe just 100,000 times. That seems a little more realistic.

Before my sophomore year began, I made a promise to myself: I wasn’t going to think. Don’t worry Mom, I still make extremely conscious and smart decisions (for the most part). However, I have always lived my life as a chronic over thinker and am still working on it. I over think everything, and I’ve started to let go of that and let myself do things just because I want to. I made a promise to myself to do things that would make mehappy, and not worry about other’s cares or predispositions. Yes, I still think about other’s feelings because I am still a decent human being; but I stopped putting what everyone thought before my own happiness. And here’s the most shocking part: it worked.

Here are 20 things I did sophomore year that I never thought I would do freshman year:

1. Join a sorority.

2. Go to date parties.

3. Take organic chemistry.

4. Take physics

5. Hate physics (Okay, maybe I could have predicted that one).

6. Drop a major.

7. Pick up a new major.

8. Actually talk to boys and not be a hermit in my room.

9. Hate tequila.

10. Eventually like tequila again.

11. Study more than I ever have. Ever.

12. Join Kids In Nutrition (shout out KIN).

13. Write for Odyssey.

14. Lose some friends.

15. Meet some of my best friends through my sorority (shout-out DG).

16. Meet some of my best friends through my classes and major.

17. Live in an apartment.

18. Be one of “those girls” going to themed parties on the weekdays.

19. Finally (for the most part) figure out what career path I want to go on.

20. Be so extremely in love with my life and the people in it.

I don’t care how cliché the last one was. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy with my life and how I’ve chosen to represent myself. All of my high school career, I was completely immersed in one thing and I started to see it as the only thing I could and would do. When I entered my sophomore year, I realized that I've spent my entire life wrapped up in this box of my passion because I saw it as the only way I could identify myself. I didn’t know who I would be if that wasn’t “my thing.” That’s when I realized that I didn’t have to have one thing just defining me; multiple things could define me. I now identify myself as a biopsychology major, a teacher, a Delta Gamma, a writer and still a dancer. And I’ve never been happier.

So, thank you sophomore year. You killed me mentally and physically, but I have never been happier, and I am proud to have come out alive.