The future.
It’s what everybody thinks and talks about all the time. What am I going to do tomorrow? What should we have for dinner on Saturday? Where should I go to college? As a senior in high school, I have constantly been thinking about what I want to do after college. And I’m not the only one asking that question. I have been asked this question by my parents, siblings, grandparents, coworkers, friends, teachers, etc. a thousand times already, but how am I supposed to decide what and who I want to be when I still have to ask permission to use the restroom during class? How can these people expect us to know exactly what we want to do with our adult lives when they still treat us like children?
And yet, that is the question that every high school senior continues to have to answer a hundred times over. This is a question that many of us have no idea how to answer. But does anybody really know exactly what they want to do after college? When Oprah Winfrey was 18 years old, did she know that she was going to be one of the most famous talk show hosts in the world? Did JK Rowling always know that she would write on of the most popular book series in the world?
The answer to these questions is probably not. I mean, Oprah got fired from being a news anchor before she became a talk show host and Rowling’s manuscript for "Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone" was rejected 12 times by the same publishing company that eventually ended up publishing her books. They didn’t know what the future held for them and they failed on their first go at it, but eventually they made it to where they were happy with their careers and lives. And isn’t that really what we all want?
I was watching a movie with my mom the other day called "Julie and Julia." It’s about how Julie Powell cooked her way through Julia Child’s entire cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” in the span of one year. In the movie, Julia’s husband says, “You know, Julia Child wasn’t always Julia Child.” It was that quote that got me to thinking about how not everybody has always been who they turned out to be.
It sometimes takes people years to decide what they want to do and who they want to be. I’ve figured out that that is okay. People continue to learn who they are as a person through college and even after college because your growth doesn't end once you grow up. You are allowed to wait to decide who you want to be because while you’re supposed to choose these things now, you’re still a kid. And kids grow and learn. It’s what they are supposed to do.
So eventually, yeah, you’re going to have to make a choice. A choice of career, a choice of character, a choice that will affect the rest of your life. But guess what? You get to decide who you want to be. Because you are who you are and no one else is allowed to change that. So while all of the people around us keep asking, “What do you want to do after college?” remember that you get to choose your path and you can change directions anytime you want, and no one can take that away from you.
