Letter to My First-Year Self — Avital Krifcher
Dear first-year Avi,
College will be magnificent, intoxicating, all-encompassing, and also boring at times. This will be shown to you in the best ways, and also in the worst ways. Just know that everything that happens, was supposed to happen. We are okay in the end! Or, if we’re not completely okay, we are working on it. So, I am not going to tell you to do anything differently, okay? Because then we wouldn’t be who we are now, and we are very proud of who we are now! But, I do have some wishes for you. Some wisdom that would have served me well if I had learned it earlier.
I wish for you to be silly. You enter college so serious, so ready to become an adult, so proud of your maturity. You are so fearful of coming off young, and you are so ready to be seen as a leader, someone to take responsibility and fly with it, that you forget your silliness. You do find your silliness over time — in the first floor office of the Bronfman Center with people you call your friends and teachers, on the streets of Berlin where you least expected to find it, in your body in dance studios. Once you feel the lightness of unfiltered goofiness, you are so much happier.
I wish for you to breathe in more deeply. You enter college so rushed. Constantly moving, never taking a moment, and somehow never napping?! Frankly, when you start college, you aren’t a very good breather. Over time, you will learn the importance of grounding. Of inhaling for 4, and exhaling for 6, and you will learn that the weight of the world that you have put on yourself is inconsequential. The weight is there, and it is important to manage, but you can breathe through it, and it will make it….okay. I wish for you to place your feet on bare earth more — this will help, I promise.
Finally, I wish for you to practice giving care and love to yourself, as much (if not more) as you give to others. You enter college willing and raring to give so much of yourself to others, that you forget that you deserve it too. You deserve rest, and hugs, and patience, and tolerance. You deserve to turn your phone off, to dance around your apartment, to gift yourself calmness and serenity in whatever way you choose. You give one hundred percent of yourself to everything that you do, I wish for you to gift yourself that same devotion and attention.
You are going to find your people, and you are going to find your places. And it’s going to be everything that it needed to be.
