My high school experience began with my hair dyed a weird shade of brown, and lots and lots of homemade bracelets on either wrist. History was boring. Poetry was for the kids who were too lame to know any better. And well, I really thought things could never be this good. I don’t know when it happened. But somewhere along the way to “here,” my hair grew out to its natural shade and my arms hung naked. In about a month, I will sign up for college classes, mostly in the social sciences. And one thing you should know about me is that I am so, so in love with words. I wish I could do this the “right way” and tell you what made me like this and how “that’s just what high school’s about.” All I know, though, is that the most important change of my last four years has been the realization that each of us is essential, that all us people are connected. It’s sufficiently easy to feel sympathy for others—the little African children who haven’t eaten more than scraps since two Thursdays ago, the scraggly middle-aged man on the side of the road who just wants somebody to let him earn a living, or that girl who could “light up a room,” except that she died from a car bomb in Baghdad. But what’s even easier is to think those people are beyond our grasp. I want you and me to remember always that even the anonymous shadows and foreign names who will never be a part of our immediate lives, even they are living in this same screwed up, beautiful world. Our actions affect them, and theirs us. And I promise—we can do more than feel for others; we can help them. But the thing is, it starts with the people around us. It starts by committing to the single most powerful thing we have as humans—being kind. Straying away from judgment and understanding that, in the end, we’re all just trying to make it will take you a long way. Or at least that’s how it seems to me. So this is the end. This is me finishing off two and a half years of so-called journalism, four long, but oh so short, years in this place, and seventeen years as a kid in the middle of Iowa. This is me telling you that I haven’t quite figured it all out. I will keep trying though, I swear.