A Letter to my Past Self
	Looking back at my life, I think to myself, “What made my life good? What did I accomplish to make myself happy?” Those are things that I constantly thought throughout my life as well, and I remember I landed on the quote, “It’s the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape.” (Why We Need To Slow Down Our Lives” by Pico Iyer – Moreau FYE Week One) Being a musical person myself, this quote always resonated with me because, well, its true. If music just keeps going on and on, it gets repetitive and boring. We need rests, breaks, and transitions in music to make it more interesting and involved. I realized that is also what we need in real life. Just going through the motions of life can lead to a very depressing, drab life, one that no one really wants to live. But those breaks, those intermissions, is what helps build up our life into something very enjoyable. Another thing is though, you can’t force these rests or breaks. They need to come naturally, or else they just won’t be as effective as they are supposed to be. Constantly dwelling on how to make your life better, or how to change your life does nothing but make you stressed and trying to find answers where they simply don’t exist, which is what I started to do when I was younger. I’m glad I ended up changing my thought process from that because it was a very hard time in my life. 
	Stressing out about what I was going to do in my future was something I dwelled on a lot. I knew I wanted to go into the medical field, but being pre-med was just so stressful. The work was genuinely hard, and it sucked seeing other non STEM major friends having a fun social life when I was just stuck inside doing homework a lot of the time. This helped me realize that I could expand my horizons and not just look at what I had always thought I was going to do. The quote, “If you had told me 15 years ago that I was going to be a clinical psychologist and that I was going to study cancer I would not have believed you. I wanted to be a diplomat. I wanted to focus on international relations, and actually my first interaction with Notre Dame was through a summer global studies institute where we were talking about Sunni Shiite relations in the middle east, so a far cry from what I do today.” (Domer Dozen by Notre Dame Alumni Association – Moreau FYE Week Two) helped me see that there was more to life than just stressing and restricting myself to a specific future. I soon learned how to stop stressing out so much. I taught myself to “go with the flow” and it made my life so much better. Panic and anxiety attacks became less of a constant in my life, and I started feeling more free and happier. I am glad that I was able to show myself that life wasn’t just about the future, and that I also needed to live in the present.
	Happiness wasn’t always a constant for me in college. College is hard. I was stressed out a lot of the time, and there were a lot of dark, anxiety attack ridden days. Going a day at a time was even hard for me sometimes. Getting out of bed wasn’t always the easiest, and sometimes, it took my closest friends to convince me to get up and go to classes. The quote, “Happiness changes fro moment to moment, day to day. Joy, on the other hand, is much deeper and much more central, it comes from within, and it’s a genuine rightness of how one lives one’s life,” (Meet the Nun Who Wants you to Remember that you will die by Ruth Graham - Moreau FYE Week 3) really helped me understand that I wasn’t always going to be happy, and that that was okay.
	Choosing if I wanted to be pre-med was an entirely different struggle than deciding what I wanted my major to be. I heard the quote, “There is no ‘best major out there – but there is a ‘best major for you.’” (Navigating your Career Journey – Moreau First Year Experience Course by The Meruelo Family Center for Career Development – Moreau FYE Week 4)Hearing that really helped me that what is best for someone else might not be the best thing for me and that it is okay for people to have their own personal preferences. It also showed me that individuality is a good thing and that you shouldn’t be ashamed if other people are interested or better at other things than you. After having a discussion with one of my close friends about potentially choosing a different major, I felt a lot better and realized that maybe what I was studying wasn’t the easiest major, but it was something that I was genuinely interested in and wanted to learn more about. 
	As I had said before, I was depressed in college, and it took a huge toll on my school work and my social life. I was so sad a lot of the time, and it was hard to keep a positive outlook on life when I just felt so bad in the dumps. The quote, ‘On my worst days, it can be difficult to name a single good thing that happened. So on those days, especially, I try to name three things for which I’m grateful. Recent examples include a particularly good cup of coffee, fresh peonies on the coffee table, a funny meme, a sweet moment with my husband, a text from a friend at just the right time,” (The Right Way to be Introspective (Yes, There’s a Wrong Way by Tasha Eurich – Moreau FYE Week 6) really helped me understand that even if I do have negative thoughts floating around in my mind, I can always take time to appreciate the little things in life. Even just taking a chance to stop and smell the roses, acknowledging the tiny things that you might not even realize make you smile, can make your day just a little bit better. 
	Lastly, I want to reflect on my life, and how I expected my future to go. The quote, “The future is made of yous, it is made of encounters, because life flows through our relations with others,” (Why the Only Future Worth Building Includes Everyone by Pope Francis – Moreau FYE Week 7) means a lot because it shows me that it is important to look back on my life. When bad things happen in my life, I tend to try and ignore them and just forget about them, but I realized that’s not healthy. I have to learn to acknowledge everything that happens in my life because all of those things shaped me up to who I am today and what life I lived, and I am eternally grateful for that and proud of myself for everything I have been through.