This fateful day has come with a slurry of bittersweet feelings, and yet it refuses to pause for my skipping heart: my last Royal Reporter article. For this special edition, I will be sharing the single most important lessons I have learned in my four years at Rosary:

1. Accept the unexpected.
2. Seek the unexpected.

These may seem so simple, and yet it took four years of academic labor, social growth, and personal experience to figure it out. During my freshman year, I truly and whole-heartedly believed that I would major in neuroscience and swim competitively in college. If you’ve ever even heard my name one time, you know this is ridiculous. I didn’t truly accept that I was destined to write for the rest of my life until my first semester of senior year, seeking other, more practical majors to supplement the disbelief I harbored that I could pursue something in which I truly found endless joy.

When I look at these epochal benchmarks in my high school career, it’s extremely easy to trace the changes in my life to specific moments. Emma Silva ’23 and I decided that we would switch into Journalism instead of double-sciencing because we’d talked about possibly making a magazine, and yet both of us were drawn into the role of script captain by our older classmates and Ms. Barclay by excessive peer pressure. Only through these two moments am I able to stand looking toward my next four years of creative writing at USC, and nothing more.

I only became friends with Emma because I worked up the courage to ask her about a musician we both liked which took about a week only for us to connect over Zoom school during the most unexpected pandemic of this century when we’d goof around over FaceTime during breaks. And yet I accept the absurdity of our humble beginnings as forever friends. If I had drowned in how improbable the situation was by relying on my pre-existing friends and interests, I never would have met the friends and mentors that made my future in writing possible.

As my years continued and I was script captain a few more times, I tried to repeat these unlikely events in order to replicate the success I’d had with journalism, finding a friend in Emma, and finding my passion with Red and Gold with varying success.

I impulsively joined robotics after I quit swimming, I learned how to play chess, I taught myself how to code, I started a blog, I wrote a play or two, I tried my hand at improv (bet you didn’t know that one), I joined countless clubs, I worked up the courage to talk to many people I wanted to be friends with, I took the tough classes that excited me– I did not succeed in all of these endeavors. But to even succeed in one means that I have sought the unexpected that life has to offer me, and what better way to thrive than to look upon the chaos and see opportunity.

I bet you were expecting something funny or unserious, but everything about me is at least a little bit funny if you think about it a little, like how I’ve got a ‘would you rather’ in my back pocket involving a massage, a briefly trained gorilla, and Gary Busey with some sweet nothings.

Goodbye to the Royal Reporter. Fellow Royals, look kindly upon whatever or whomever frightens and excites you because it might just be the thing that changes you so profoundly it becomes who you are.