When you’re 12 you have a vision on how your life is going to go. You’ll graduate high school with scholarships, you’ll make the greatest of friends in college that’ll last you a lifetime, you’ll graduate within four years with two degrees, follow a straight path and land your dream job.
Fast forward a couple of years. Sure, you graduated high school with scholarships earning you a spot at your dream school, and you’ll make the greatest of friends in college, but now most of them are graduating at the end of the semester and you’re not.
You’re on your fourth year of college, with another and a half left to go. You’ve changed majors too many times you’re embarrassed to tell people just how many, and you feel your life come to a standstill. Panic soon strikes as the sudden realization of knowing you’ve veered off your intended course comes crushing in.
Maybe it's your fault for surrounding yourself with friends whose ambitions and accomplishments make your efforts seem small, or maybe its the regret of wasting so much time freshman year when you could’ve been checking items off your list and adding them to your resume.
You begin to feel consumed by the unending questions and pressures from parents. It’s easy to feel locked in and constrained when your aspirations exceed your strengths. When you feel the space between you and opportunities grow bigger and bigger by the second, and you’re left fixed in place unable to reach out.
When I was younger, I always wanted to be in charge of my life and any situation. I wanted to control the world around me and have everything fixed in its place. Growing up, I felt I began losing my grip on any control concerning my future and any visions I had left for it. The high levels of confidence I had for myself plummeted until I was left panicking and doubtful of any comeback.
Having enough of wallowing in self-pity, I stepped back and reminded myself that this feeling of unknowingness is normal. Some people know what they want, and some don’t and that's OK. The road towards your objective won’t be a straight pathway no matter how much you want it to be. Self-reflectiveness on my innermost goals felt overwhelming at first, but familiarizing myself with that nervousness helped me feel more in control.
Life has a tendency of coming at you fast. It’s expected of you to always be ready, to have all the tools needed to battle your way through any obstacle and have a clear mind towards what you’ve always wanted. But in reality, we all struggle. We don’t have all the tools, and we don’t have all the answers. We might feel in control of our paths one minute and feel it spiral out of control another. We work hard for what we think we want and discover we might want something different.
Our lives are shaped by our surroundings and our aspirations change with us and that’s OK. People are always pressuring us to find our purpose in life and our place in it, and we might not have an answer a year, or five or thirty from now. Making family and friends proud has always been vital to me, but reminding myself that this is my life and no one else's was a step towards clearing my mind and reassuring my self worth.
Some of us want a high paying job, a desk and a house in the suburbs with a picket white fence. Some of us want to stay in hostel after hostel across the world with nothing weighing us down. We all find adventure and contentment in our own way, and contentment is something I am determined to attain.
