College App Season Is Over

College application season is officially, finally, mercifully over, and now that the dust has settled and every decision is in, I keep circling back to the same realization: I got unbelievably lucky, and I'm so ridiculously grateful for how the whole thing ended up shaking out.

I was stressing for nothing

Here's the part that's kinda hilarious in hindsight — all that stress, all those nights I spent spiraling and refreshing portals and running every worst-case scenario in my head before a single result was even out, looks so unbelievably childish to me now. Like genuinely, I was so locked into the anxiety of it all that I completely lost the plot on how tiny every one of those things actually was in the grand scheme, and looking back I almost want to reach through time and shake my past self and tell him to chill, to go to sleep, to stop treating every little deadline like it was the end of the world, because not one second of that worrying changed a single thing except quietly making me miserable for no reason at all.

Grateful

But the biggest thing I'm walking away with is just gratitude, plain and simple, because the truth is none of this was ever really in my hands the way I convinced myself it was. God always has a plan for me, and this whole season was just one more reminder that He's never once dropped me, even back when I was way too stressed and way too far in my own head to actually notice it happening in real time. Everything that was meant to work out worked out, and every single thing I was losing sleep over turned out to be so much smaller than it ever felt in the moment.

So if you're still somewhere in the thick of it right now, lowkey losing your mind: breathe. It's gonna be okay. It was always gonna be okay.