Feelings of nostalgia usually come up in the spring as grad season comes upon us. For me, both the end of high school and the end of college felt a little traumatic, so the memories are bittersweet.

The year I graduated from high school, my dad accepted a job on Long Island. While my classmates were making plans to hang out for one last summer, I was packing my belongings and saying goodbye to my childhood home. We pulled out of our driveway and headed south two days after my graduation.

That summer felt like a lost opportunity. The friendships that had suddenly become so meaningful and intense were abruptly cut off and I found myself in a new place, surrounded by new people who were friendly… but it would be starting over only to leave in the fall for college and start over again. I wasn’t keen.

Then, the spring of my junior year of college, I discovered I was pregnant. In order to graduate with my class the following year, I went to school up until 2 weeks before the baby was due that January, then implied I “might” come back the following semester to complete the two 400 level classes I needed for my double major. Otherwise, they would have made me walk in January.

I ended up not going back to college, graduating with a single major, and missing what would have been my last semester of college. My actual last semester, I spent as a single young woman with an unplanned pregnancy at a Christian college. I had to give up my beloved Cross Country team, and endure going from confident upperclassman to Sinner Who Wanted To Disappear.

So every spring feels like a bit of a do-over. Except how could I ever “fix” what happened? And not only that, that “fix” probably would’ve changed the direction of my life forever. If I’d done things differently, I wouldn’t have my firstborn son, and nothing would justify a life without him in it.

One of the pieces of advice my mom always gave me was something along the lines of, “high school is not the end.” Some of those kids will never feel more accepted, beautiful, smart, or loved, than they did in high school, and for the rest of their lives, they’ll look back on that time with longing, went the thinking. But you, you are college bound, and high school is just a temporary resting place.

College would be where I would make my forever friends and have my best life experiences.

The sentiment was important, and valuable, because it has truth to it. High school wasn’t the culmination of everything, it was just a way stop. But college wasn’t the culmination of everything, either. I did make life-long friends there. I also have deep regrets about that time in my life.

Neither of those life experiences had anything close to the neat closing credits that I wanted. Life has proven to be messier than I had hoped most of the time. While I look forward to spring’s longer days and fresh growth, I also have to be mindful of the tendency for those seasonal memories to drag me down.

I want to be renewed by spring, not trapped by it. The passage of time doesn’t seem to matter to the place deep down where feeling memories are stored. I’m still taken right back with little warning to fear, sadness, or shame. Only recently have I begun to learn how to let those feelings happen with getting in a tussle with myself over it.