Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Five years? One year?
Think about it for a minute.
Do you have a long-term plan? Have you ever seriously thought about what you want your life to look like in the next few years?
Well I have tried.
I've thought about what I want to do when I graduate. Should I go on to graduate school?
I've thought about where I want to live. Do I want to stay close to home or travel the world?
I've considered the people who are a part of my life. Will I still be friends with her? Is he going to even remember my name in five years?
I have tried desperately to plan out my future. But to be honest, I have absolutely no idea where my life will be in the next month let alone the next 5-10 years. And I realize now, that's okay.
Today we have such pressure to figure out who we are and what we are supposed to do by a certain age. We are supposed to go to college and get a degree by our early 20s. As soon as we get out of school, we're expected to go on to start our career. Then we are to find the man or woman we want to spend the rest of our lives with and start our own family.
We aren't supposed to do any of these things too young or too old or we will be judged. We are expected to have everything figured out by the time we are out of college. But I never could understand why that is. I mean seriously, we are only in our early 20s, how can people expect us to decide what path our life is to go down?
For a long time I spent my life comparing myself to other people.
In high school I had no idea where I wanted to go to college when it seemed like everyone else had already committed to their dream school.
When I got to college everyone seemed to have their set major and I changed mine three times before figuring out what classes actually interested me.
As my first two years passed by, all my friends had already found internships with companies that were interested in offering them jobs when they graduated. I was still working at the same summer job I had been doing for the past three years.
Then came the relationships. Why does it feel like everyone is in a seriously committed and long-term relationship? They've been dating since high school and want to get married some day and I'm still single with no love interests.
For a while, nothing in seemed to be going right. I felt like I was so behind in life because I wasn't doing things exactly the way I was supposed to.
But guess what.
That's okay.
Not everyone knows where they want to go to school. There are so many options and you may not be able to picture yourself at any of them.
Not everyone has decided what they want to study. Colleges today offer so many classes in all different fields, why shouldn't we take as many as we can? If we limit ourselves to one specific field, we are closing our minds off from learning about so many other interesting things.
Not everyone has a dream job. We haven't all dreamed of being a child psychologist since we were four years old. Heck, at 4 years old we probably didn't even know what that meant.
And no, not everyone will marry their high school sweetheart. It takes years to find the person you are meant to be with, and some of us may find that we prefer to spend our lives enjoying the world on our own. But either way, we don't have to rush into anything just because our best friend just got engaged.
We can't possibly know exactly where our lives will end up. No matter how much we try, things will never always go exactly as planned. We may find that our dream job isn't as perfect as we imagined and our best friends may become acquaintances we see only on occasion. But that doesn't mean we are living our lives wrong. It only means that we are living in the moment. I have found that it actually means that we can appreciate what is around us now rather than worrying about what will happen down the road. Because truthfully, we will never know what comes next, so why should we worry about what we cannot control.
So my answer is no. No, I do not know what my life will be like 10 years from now. And that's okay.
