Forever a Knight.
They were still the Golden Knights when I started attending the University of Central Florida.
And what I learned there, the support it provided and the love it gave to my life have left an impression in my heart that I will carry for as long as my soul goes on.
The year I began at UCF was also the beginning of the most challenging time of my life.
There were several times during my three and a half years there that I wondered if I’d even graduate. My family was struggling at home and I felt stress, deep sadness and even guilt around enjoying that time of my life.
But, I did enjoy it.
And I worked to keep my sanity and scholarships one semester at a time. It was at UCF I learned the balance of having fun and working hard and the struggle of not letting go.
It was at UCF I fell in love, over and over again.
Sometimes with friends, sometimes with brothers, sometimes with mentors and just once with my neighbor across the hall.
I was very active in that business fraternity where I fell in love with those brothers; now I call them family. There is a friend from that time that gave me the honor of being a godmother. There is a mentor who became a second mother, and is even today.
The relationships I made at UCF are amongst the most genuine in my life.
That neighbor, yeah, he’s the one I make a home and a life with now. He’s the one I worked through my last semesters with. We had the same major even before we knew the other existed.
It didn’t come without deep pain those years of my life.
And even now there’s pain as the distance that separate those I made such deep bonds with have gone off into their own lives after school.
I often say if someone would pay for me to go back and do it all over again, I would. But the truth is nothing could possibly compare.
Those days cannot be relived or replaced.
It’s nostalgia that I feel when I reflect on it now. But like so many others with their own Alma Matter, that place will always feel like home.
I will always bleed black and gold and I will always feel indebted to the place that held me so tightly and so tenderly as I transitioned from a youngster to an adult, as I fell apart and built myself back up one new memory at a time all across that campus.
I hope one day to give to the University of Central Florida as much as it gave to me, and I’ll always remember it for the irreplaceable people it brought into my life.
Love,
Natalie