There is a weight that comes with the end of a season. It is not a dramatic slam of a door but a quiet pressure behind the ribs, a feeling that follows you from room to room. Tonight I was folding clothes, moving stacks of shirts from one corner of my room to another, when the thought finally hit with its full force: I am leaving.

Senior year has been this slow, steady drumbeat for so long, and suddenly it is speeding up. The posters look smaller. The photos look older. My room, the one place that has held every joke, every argument, and every late-night scramble, feels less like home and more like a stage I am about to walk off of. And the thing that scares me is not the lights going dark. It is stepping into a place with no script.

I have imagined next year a hundred different ways. Sometimes it is exciting: new friends, new campuses, new routines. Other times it feels hollow, like stepping into a dorm room before the furniture arrives. The honest truth is that I do not know where I will be a few months from now. I do not know the campus I will learn to navigate or the people who will shape my days. And that unknown is massive.

But then I look at my wall.

There are photos from conventions, weird-angle snapshots at parties, and Polaroids from moments that did not seem important at the time but ended up meaning everything. I see faces that used to be strangers, people I would have walked past without noticing years ago. And the strangest realization settles in: I have already been everywhere I might go.

BBYO did not change my life with fireworks or neon. It changed slowly. One conversation becomes a sleepover, which becomes a road trip, which becomes the kind of friendship where you hand someone your car keys at two in the morning. These are not just relationships. They are patterns and threads, a whole network of belonging woven before I have even picked a college.

There was a girl who went to my high school. For years, we existed on opposite sides of the same building without ever crossing paths. Then BBYO put us in the same orbit, and she became family. Running into her at Tulane, a city I had only seen in movies, felt like stumbling upon a secret doorway in a place I thought I already understood. She reminded me that sometimes the universe places familiar souls in unfamiliar places on purpose.

And she is just one person in a much larger constellation. BBYO has a way of placing people in my life who become quiet constants, the kind who can turn a strange street into something safe simply by standing there. It is wild how a city you have never visited can suddenly feel lived-in because someone you trust is already rooted there.

This even changed how I think about colleges. Campuses stopped being about buildings or statistics. They became about people. The laughter that could fill those hallways, the conversations that might reshape me, the traditions that might naturally fall into place. Schools I once dismissed became possibilities because I could suddenly picture myself there with the right people nearby. Even the schools I thought I knew, the ones tied to family or expectation, became different once I experienced them through my own relationships. What should have been familiar became personal.

One of my closest friends, someone I would not even know without BBYO, ended up at a school I once refused to consider. I thought it was too close or too predictable, like choosing it would trap me in the same routine forever. But watching him live his life there changed everything. He did not slip into a ready-made identity. He built his own. He found people who pushed him, communities that strengthened him, and opportunities that surprised him. He turned a place I feared would limit him into a launchpad. He taught me that familiarity is not a cage. It is a springboard.

And that is the greatest thing BBYO has ever given me: the understanding that relationships do not hold you back. They launch you forward. They are the ropes you climb, the bridges you walk across, and the handholds you trust when the next leap feels too big.

People like to say that college is where you find yourself. I think that sounds dramatic and a little off. You do not find yourself the way you find a lost sweatshirt in the laundry room. You recognize yourself in the people who love you. You see who you are in the connections you carry. Who I am is not a single point. It is a constellation of everyone who shaped me, trusted me, challenged me, and stayed with me.

Leaving hurts because that constellation stretches. You feel the grief in the small goodbyes: the last diner run, the last late-night drive, the last morning your room looks exactly the same. Life reveals itself in fragments, shared playlists, inside jokes, and midnight calls, and now those fragments will scatter.

But scattering is not breaking. It is planting. Trees do not cling to their seeds. They release them so new things can grow.

BBYO gave me seeds.

And when the fear hits, when the future feels overwhelming, I return to the small truths. A door someone held open for me on a campus that intimidated me. A conversation under trees older than all of us. A moment when I felt myself fully in a place I barely knew. These moments remind me that the right place is simply the one that feels like mine.

This is the last season of high school and the first season of everything else. It will be chaotic and calm, overwhelming and grounding. There will be nights when the room feels too empty and days when every decision feels like a domino. But there will also be mercy: a text from an old friend, a familiar face on a new campus, a moment that tells me I am where I am meant to be.

I do not know my dorm next year or the colors I will wear. But I know this. I already have a map, and it is made of people. It is not a replacement for the person I will become. It is the scaffolding that will hold me up while I build who I am trying to be.

BBYO did not erase the fear. It gave me a way through it. It gave me people who will catch me when I leap or leap with me. So I fold one last shirt, straighten one last photo, and breathe. The future is enormous, but it is threaded with faces that make me believe I can walk straight into the unfamiliar and somehow already belong.