Here are the particular changes in my life that took place in a short couple months:

• I decided, because I had enough credits for the option, to graduate a semester early. Why stay any longer in a place I didn’t care for anyways? Get out of that place I didn’t like! Ugh! Bring on the bigger, better things of the future. As for the present? Who cares!

• I did not value keeping up my friendships I had established, thinking I was just heading off to college in the fall anyways, I was ready to move on, and my imperfect Santa Fe friendships would be replaced by more meaningful friendships that college over the next four years would provide. Friendships? Whatever!

• Now, swim team, losing my senior year of swimming, that was an immediate, devastating and unexpected consequence of my decision to graduate early. My senior year swimming, that is the only activity I valued at the time. I had just rekindled my relationship with the sport that year, beginning to truly enjoy it after several years of turbulence and not knowing if I was swimming because of habit or because I really wanted to. Senior year, as a swimmer, probably for any high school athlete, that is where you go out with a bang and qualify for the state competition. But that would not happen now, because I was removed from the team halfway through the swim season.

• Soon afterwards, in the early part of the next year, my horse, ‘Lucky’, who had been up for sale for a while, he finally sold. I had not been focused on riding for the past year, and keeping a horse I was not riding regularly, was too expensive.
• Keeping animals around that you’ve developed a relationship with over the past several years, and which represented pretty much your entire childhood and teenager life’s involvement with horses? Whatever! I’m going to college in the fall!