When I was 12, all I wanted to do was grow up and to become a teenager. I’m not entirely sure what I expected myself to become; maybe I saw myself attending a college on the beach or across the country living in some big city. But I don’t think I ever realized how scary it is to actually grow up.

If I had to sum up my high school experience, I would throw around the word “nightmare” to help describe it. I remember coming home crying on the first day of freshman year because my Chinese 3 class was full of upperclassmen (none of whom I knew) and the teacher was speaking a language that I barely understood. That day set the tone for the rest of the year, and I knew that it was going to be an uphill battle for the next four.

Frankly, high school was far from pretty, especially junior year. I constantly ran on four hours of sleep and an unhealthy amount of black coffee, and I saw my tutors more often than I saw my own brother. It was a brutal 10 months. However, junior year and high school as a whole taught me resilience in a way that was harsh yet necessary.

One thing that my 12-year-old self and my current self would agree upon is this: I have no clue what I’m doing. I have lived by the motto “fake it till you make it” for as long as I could remember. Some people would say that this way of thinking is unsustainable. I beg to differ. I imitated confidence for the last decade of my life, and I can genuinely say that it has made me a better person. Because, somewhere along the way, the confidence became real.

There’s a lot of things I’m grateful for, but most of all, I’m grateful for my family. When I was hurting, my mom was there to pick up the broken pieces and help piece me back together. When I was running on nothing but anxiety, my dad bought me hot lattes and let me blast “The Lucky One” by Taylor Swift in the car. When I needed a smile, my brother was there to hug me and make me laugh at his silly antics. When I got into college, they were the first ones to cry for me because they knew I lived through all of that to get to that very moment. My family, above all else, has made me feel loved when I felt like nothing.

And to my friends, thank you for everything. Thank you for letting me hold onto you when I felt like I was falling apart at the seams. Thank you for dancing with me at every Homecoming and every prom, for joining the FaceTime calls at insanely late hours of the night, for going on car rides with the sunroof open and windows down, and for being a place to call home.

Growing up is scary, and I hope that my younger self is proud of what we’ve become. I hope she knows how lucky she is to have her family and friends, and I hope she knows that we made it. We’re graduating.