Mark Anthony once wrote, “She wouldn’t let others define her; she wrote her own story and she lived it.”

Page by page.

Sentence by sentence.

Word by word.

We have all pieced together the story we call “our lives” from the day we opened the book at birth. Thoughts have been recorded, feelings tied in, all wrapped together in our memories. Pages have been devoted to imaginary friends, chapters to childhood birthdays. 

As we continued to write, there were grass stains on blue jeans, family bike rides around the block and going out for ice cream with our friends.

As relationships developed, we learned how it felt to have a best friend and how it felt to fight with that friend. We learned the importance of family and how to ignore our annoying siblings. We let the people in our lives and our experiences shape our story, and somewhere along the way, it got complicated. We all stumbled through first crushes, first dates, first loves and we wrote it all down.

Through it all, we found passion, adventure and lust for a life worth living.

Now one of the biggest chapters of our life is coming to an end, but that does not mean we stop writing our story. We pick up our pencil and let the words flow, erasing nothing, because we want to remember everything and because we learn from those mistakes.

Do not let the worries, fears or regrets of your early chapters decide the ending to your book. Let all of those experiences, positive or negative, define who you want to be and write it.

You have the power to write your own story, we all do, so reread the chapters you’ve already written as many times as you want, but do not try to edit the past and focus on where you want your story to go.