As a Taurus, I hate change. In fact, I despise change. Unfortunately, change is an essential part of growing up. As one of the younger friends from my group at home, I faced change earlier than most do.

When I was a junior in high school, my main friend group consisted of seniors. As the school year dragged on, I dreaded the day when the seniors concluded their classes. I attended an all-girl Catholic high school on Long Island and one of our privileges was that the seniors ended classes a month earlier than the underclassmen.

My best friends went on to graduate a year before me and I felt so lonely. Of course I had friends in my own cohort, but it wasn’t the same. I cried like a baby that summer when my friends moved away to college. I felt like my world was ending because only one stayed on Long Island, or New York. From New Orleans to Charleston, everyone had been dispersed.

Senior year was hard without my friends. However, as the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder. I was ecstatic when they would come home over breaks. They surprised me when they came home for Thanksgiving. It was the first time I had seen them since they left during the summer and, once again, I cried like a baby. As the year progressed and I myself graduated from high school, I learned to cope with the scattering of my friends. It became less of the norm for all of us to be together in one place and we accepted that.

Four years later, I realize that my reaction was incredibly dramatic. My fear of change didn’t allow me to grasp the benefits of my friends and I establishing new lives. Today, my friends have graduated from college. They live everywhere from Pennsylvania to Washington D.C.

Naturally, I miss them like crazy. At the same time, we have all moved on from our childhood homes and are embracing the next steps in our lives. We are focusing on graduate school, “real” jobs and so on. While we joke that I am the youngest but the most mature member of our group, my friends do not realize how much they inspire me.

They paved the way for me to try new things and explore new places without fear. If they had all stayed within our Long Island bubble, I feel that we all would have missed out on so many amazing opportunities and experiences. I know for a fact that I would not have travelled to half of the places I have visited had my friend not moved. Not to mention, in this age of technology, everyone is a FaceTime call away.

Sometimes, change is for the best. It is hard to abandon what we know and break out of our comfort zones. Sometimes we need others to encourage us to break out of said comfort zones. Ultimately, everyone has their own plans. Whether said plans involve moving to a new city, starting a new job or something as simple as wearing a new perfume, changing it up isn’t always a bad thing. Take it from a stubborn, change-hater: embrace the new and keep an open mind. Leave fear behind and take life by storm.