We spend our young lives being told what we should look forward to. The so-called “best days of our lives.” Reflecting back, I remember in elementary school, my mom and dad would walk me to the door with my perfectly pleated uniform and a braid carefully adorning each side of my head. I would be scolded when I got home for letting my hair down in the middle of the day. The innocence, the laughter, the lack of anxieties; These are the best days of your life. Middle school: well, middle school is no one’s shining moment, so I’ll spare you. But high school, high school is where you start developing into your own person. With this came my first party, first fling, learning to drive, college applications. There was pressure, but it was amusing. These are the best days of your life. When you get to your college, you start believing everything you’d heard was true. These will finally the best days of your life. You think: this is where I decide what I do for the rest of my life. I will meet my soulmate and make my forever-friends. Then you graduate. What if you don’t magically find all you were hoping for? What happens after the best days of your life?

Being instructed almost ceremoniously throughout high school about how college would bring the best days of my life, I, like many, was determined to complete the puzzle of my future in my college years. This started with working towards the best grades and taking advantage of every opportunity, but as time went by, certain things weren’t happening as I expected they would. I found myself wondering why that was. I thought: I made it, I’m here. This was the goal all along; now what? If these were to be the best days of my life, the rest of it wasn’t going to be very exciting. This perspective shaped my college experience. It created a pressure I was not fully conscious of until my final year in college, when I felt like I was running out of time to make my best days count. Spending more time than ever consumed by my looming adulthood, I focused on reshaping my perspective.

I had a memorable college experience. I met some incredible people and learned things I never thought I would. It just felt like it was never enough. In my mind, my experiences did not signify greatness. The root of this feeling was my preconceived expectation on what college would be. It seems that being told what you will feel in a certain situation only serves to constrain your natural responses. This develops unnecessary anxieties that do little but waste your time. I feel it is important to prepare students to live their lives fully, without setting an expiration date for the greatest days of their lives. Instead, focus on doing things that make you happy. Once I stopped worrying about the time I had left and took charge of creating the best day, every day I started to feel like I was truly living the best days of my life.

My biggest fear upon graduation was that I would limit the best days of my life to college. It takes effort to wake up every day and dwell on the fact that those days will never return. It takes less effort to remember them for what they were—great times—and look forward to the many great times that lie ahead. In reality, life is comprised of stages. Each stage presents its own difficulties and lessons. College is a unique stage because the first taste of independence is always the sweetest. To this day, I truly wonder how I would feel about my early college years if I had spent less time building expectations and invested more time on friendships, studying and fun. I have changed a lot since high school, but I would say the biggest change has been seeing my personal development beyond college. It was finding out that my puzzle didn’t have to be complete by the end of my senior year. I have a whole life a growth ahead of me. A whole life of the best days.

With this change, I finally learned the truth. The truth is, every day has the potential to be one of the best day of your life. College is a worthy goal to work towards, but achieving this goal is the catalyst to creating more, to reaching higher. The best days of your life are completely up to you. Your life does not end when you graduate; not finding your soulmate or having your exact career does not make your college experience a failure or any less than those who do. We each have our own timeline. We don’t have much control over it, but every experience, or lack thereof, is a stepping stone. There are so many different paths for college students, feeling trapped in an expectation limits your growth and is not worth the copious amounts of self doubt. Just live your life, and no matter what, there will always be something beautiful to show for it.