I wash my hands four times every morning. Once after using the toilet, once before brushing my teeth, once after brushing my teeth, and finally after doing my makeup.

As I sit here typing this with strep throat, I will tell you without shame that I am the person who least deserves to be sick. I follow all the rules. I wash my hands before and after meals, I have a travel-sized bottle of Germ-X hooked on to my keys, I sneeze into my elbow (not my hands) and avoid sick people like they carry the plague (much to the dismay of my friends and family).

I blame in it on Pre-AP Freshman Biology. I still think about that video we watched where they showed a woman sneeze in slow motion and then illustrated all the germs that flew out into the air. I had a nightmare after we watched a video about dust mites crawling up people’s beds and biting them while they were asleep.

Sometimes when I go into nasty public bathrooms I imagine all the things people who were there before me could have touched. But lately, I’ve skipped washing my hands before eating lunch—only when it’s not finger food— maybe only because the restroom is so far away from the school cafeteria, but maybe just maybe I’ve finally learned that it’s okay to be messy.

Freshman year, when the germaphobia really set in, I had it all planned out. I was going to take x classes, get y grades, and go to z college. As I soon learned, life did not work that way. I didn’t always go to bed at 9 like I would’ve wanted, I didn’t always get the A on that test, and it turns out I didn’t want to take that class that would prepare me for the perfect career path.

And that’s okay. In fact it’s more than okay. I might have thought I was wise and ambitious by planning out everything before hand, but true wisdom knows that sometimes it’s okay to let go of the steering wheel–of course not while actually driving any type of mechanical contraption– and let the wind carry you along.

So maybe I haven’t decided my college major yet, one that was so set in stone a few years ago, but at least I’m not locking myself into something I’m not sure I really want. And it’s messy, but that’s okay too, because if high school has taught me one thing, that is that it is okay to get messy sometimes. After all, that 99.9% of bacteria can only make you stronger, right? At least that’s what I’ll tell myself until I get the chance to buy some more hand sanitizer.