2015 was wild.

This time last year, I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go to college. I was talking to a boy simply to waste time. I was looking forward to a long list of big things coming that seemed so far away.

Life is crazy.

I went to Disney World with my best friends on our senior class trip and had the best week of my life. We danced to Trap Queen at 2 in the morning and ate chicken nuggets for a week straight. We hosted a snack night on the pool deck with all of our extra food and made friends with people I forgot we even went to school with. I ate breakfast with Winnie the Pooh and promposed to a boy through a vine that I will forever be proud of.

And then we came home and life went on, too quickly. We went to prom. I went with the boy from this time last year, because life is strange and people always mean more than you think they will. It was a crazy night with good food and bad dancing. We wound up at a diner at 2:30 in the morning. It was the kind of night you see in the movies. I only remember bits and pieces because I was so happy but so tired. We spent the weekend away where I wound up listening to the ocean in the middle of the night, out in the sand where I couldn't see anything because of the fog.

On a brutally hot and disgusting day in June, I graduated from high school. I don't remember much, honestly. I was sitting next to a kid who was chewing tobacco but was nice enough not to let me step in it in my heels. It started raining as I waited to walk on stage and get my diploma. We spent the night on a boat where it was cold, and I was exhausted. That night was the start to a summer of looking at the stars and eating mozzarella sticks at midnight. It was the beginning of the end of a chapter.

Over the course of 2015, I visited the University of Delaware and made my decision to spend the next four years of my life there. I started school at the end of August. Over the course of the past few months, I've learned how to successfully do laundry at one in the morning, the perfect combination of vegetables on my Subway sandwich when the dining hall closes before I'm done my homework, and how to successfully get eight hours of sleep while living in a glorified youth hostel. I made friends at school and figured out how to keep my ones from home. I grew up a little but not a lot. I'm a freshman in college: it's in my wiring to make mistakes.

I don't know if it was the best year of my life, but it was pretty damn good.

Friendsgiving.

I think that the holidays put a lot of unnecessary weight on family gatherings.

Don't get me wrong; I love my family. My grandmother's one of the sassiest people I know (think Emily Gilmore from The Gilmore Girls) and my extended relatives are all great. Yet, there's something about having to sit around and force small talk for five hours that just kind of makes you wish things were different.

It's not that I think family gets too much credit; I just think that friends don't get enough. If we're going to be honest, most friendships don't last forever, so I think it's especially important to validate them while they presently exit.

I love my friends with my entire heart. I miss them when I'm at school and cry when I hug them the first night we're back on break. I text them weekly to make sure they're okay. I'm like the overbearing mother you can't decide if you really want. I guess it's true when they say that friends are the family we pick for ourselves, and I love the choices I've made.

College is this crazy time of growing up too quickly and losing track of time between parties and classes and papers and surviving. We forget to text our friends casually and then we're only talking when someone's made out with a boy from our high school and then suddenly, you're not talking at all. You're coming home on break to find out that no one has any clue what half of the group has been up to, because everyone got so swept up in their own lives for the past few months.

It happens, and it's sad.

The whole point of this post is to remind people that we have to hang out with our families. Social standards tell us that, but friends are so often pushed into the background. We've all heard the saying "blood is thicker than water".

In actuality, that saying comes from, "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."

It doesn't really matter what is thicker than what, to be honest. What is important, though, is that we remember to spend time with everyone. We need to remember to reach out to people from home while we're gone, people from school while we're home, and family when we're all over.

I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving and a nostalgic Friendsgiving.

The 7th Week Itch

I moved into college August 29th, and this past week has, by far, been the roughest one yet. School hit hard this week - I had a speech due on Monday and then a paper due on Tuesday.

And, of course, it's never that simple. I turned in my paper only to have my teacher tell me it wasn't what she wanted and that my only choice was to rewrite it. I spent that night pouring over my notes again, trying to find something I hadn't seen before and trying not to completely collapse under the stress and embarassment.

We get through life's curveballs.

I think the other aspect that made this week particularly rough was that it's Parents' and Family Weekend on campus. I was home last weekend, and it was fantastic, so I didn't expect to feel so disappointed to be spending my time with Italian homework instead of my family. The nostalgia hits so hard, though. I miss my mom's overbearing hugs and my dad's life advice. I miss the fact that my sister is going to her first Homecoming dance tonight, and I'm not there to help her with her hair or zip up her dress.

I miss high school, too. The football games, the school spirit, the never ending love for each other and our class. You think that it lasts forever or that, at the very least, other people will be able to relate to the same struggle in college. I've found, though, that other people just didn't have the same kind of school spirit. Maybe we were lucky because we wanted to debunk the big high school myth: we wanted to matter to each other.

And I know that a lot of people didn't know who I was and that they wouldn't recognize me tomorrow, but it's okay. I had friends who loved me more than I could ever love myself, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

So, I miss the people and places and their weird traditions. I miss how my life used to be, because no matter how great it's becoming, I still worry that the best years have already come and gone.