Dear 17 year old me, 

You are about to have the three most life-changing years. Admittedly, it won’t turn out as you expect it to.

The first thing that will happen is that you will meet a boy and fall in love. This is the point of your evolution as a person. It won’t be a childlike infatuation, it will be a deeper and more meaningful connection than you have ever experienced in your life. For the first time in life you won’t be scared to jump blindly of a cliff. You will live with him. It will be like a whirlwind, sweeping you off your feet before unceremoniously dumping you to the ground. It will be a hard blow that will take a long time to recover from. You will do lots of things you’re not proud of as a coping mechanism; your guard will be higher than ever.

You will move out to your own flat and your friends will pull you through to a functional level. Yes, that grief will still be there but it will no longer overwhelm you. You will start to become more independent, quitting the job you hate for another you enjoy. The biggest change in your life is that you will somehow pass the International Baccalaureate and get a place at your first choice University, despite almost quitting for the boy eight months ago. 

He will not have lost his grip on you, though. Despite him being in a new relationship, you will continue to go back there. Then, you will go on a holiday with your friends and this changes everything. You will not go home as planned. You will stay in Greece and discover a new perspective on life. You will realise that you always say you want to do things, or imagine how they should turn out, yet you never do anything proactive to achieve them. Your real friends helped you to realise that you have lived a life under forced expectations and that your dreams and hopes for the future are the ones you are not fulfilling.

Despite this, you are still not quite strong enough to break away from normality and continue to University. You will have a great time, however, your year there leaves you feeling unsatisfied, eager to run free (and the boy from the past, although a pivotal point, he is now history). You feel caged and you realise that you need to have the freedom to be yourself, to travel and write and learn and maybe even one day fall in love again. This was always your dream, only you were too scared to do it. You were anchored by your family, a relationship, rent, University and most probably would be afterwards by your employer. 

So you quit. You booked a one-way plane ticket to Spain and in thirty nine days you are off to start your adventure. You are terrified, but you finally understand that you will never be happy thinking “what if” and that you have to take the blind leap off a cliff. Even if it ends in heartbreak, that will eventually pass. Life is too short to stand on the edge debating. 

Yes, you will make friends and lose friends, there will be ups and downs, but the best thing is that you still don’t know any of this. You have finally learnt to stop trying to predict the future and enjoy the journey.

Love,
The 20 year old me