Dear Grace, 

As I remember you, you’re waiting — waiting for an awkward silence to fill the Zoom classroom after everyone else has already spoken before offering your opinion, waiting for someone else to come over to you and offer to be friends instead of approaching them yourself, and waiting for your sense of self to one day fall into your lap so that you’ll finally know what to do with yourself. You’re waiting because you’re riddled with self-doubt and believe that you’re not yet equipped with the right skills or talents to aspire for something greater. Paradoxically, it’s your fixation on being something better than what you are that causes you to overlook everything that’s right in front of you. 

The very traits that you possess, both good and bad, are what will get me to where I am. It’s your love for art, music, writing, and everything else correlated with unemployment that will allow me to find a place on campus as a mentor and a journalist. It’s your tenacity and ability to withstand sleep deprivation that helped me barely scrape by in Calculus, a class you vowed to never take. It’s your easily impressionable nature that will cause you to join mock trial after a new friend gives an unconvincing elevator pitch, one of the best decisions you’ll make. It’s the fact that you’re so hard on yourself that will make it so that now, four years later, I can look back on what I’ve done in high school and feel that I’ve given it my all. 

I know right now it feels like waiting is your safest bet, but I also know that you’re capable of so much more than that. At the same time, tension is what keeps the tightrope walker alive, but with too much tension, the tightrope snaps. Give yourself grace, Grace, to make mistakes. Breathe a little. It’s time to stop waiting.

Love, 

Grace