Two years of preschool. Six years of elementary school. Four years of middle school (ninth graders weren’t at the high school yet). And three years of high school. That’s a grand total of fifteen years of school. With the years I’ve completed at college, I’m up to nineteen years. Four years of college have passed by very quickly. However, I have one more year to go.

It’s called the “super senior” year. I used to be self-conscious about taking that extra year. I actually could’ve graduated at the end of April. About two years ago, I came to the realization that I wasn’t sure what I really wanted to do with my life. I had been studying my major for two and a half years. I just had to finish another year and a half, and then I could begin what was supposed to be my lifelong career. Now this simply isn’t a decision that I made lightly. My decision would affect my life., specifically time and money.

I wrestled with my thoughts and feelings: I should stay with my initial plan so I can get done in four years and start working. But what if what I’ve been studying isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life? What if my true calling is something completely unrelated to what I’ve spent the last four years studying?

I would ask myself these questions practically every single day. It got to the point where I was very anxious when it came to thinking about my future. I didn’t (and still don’t) want to mess anything up. I had this anxiety for a while. After all, I had felt like I knew what I wanted to do since junior year of high school. I felt sorry for changing my mind. But I never should have needed to feel that way.

Movies, books, and people have always told me that I would find a dream job that I’d want to pursue and stick with for the rest of my life. I’ve always heard that I should strive to find a job that I’d look forward to working every day. Now I’m not saying that I was lied to, but I have started to realize that this is a very big, nearly impossible dream to reach. Even if you do have a job that you love, every day won’t be perfect. A lot of people have jobs that they don’t mind working every day. In other words, they are okay with going to work every day because they know they have to support themselves somehow. And that’s okay.

High school students are expected to make decisions about what they want to do for the rest of their lives. They are supposed to graduate at seventeen/eighteen years old and go immediately to college to study what they want to do for the rest of their lives. It’s just not as simple as that. No matter how much we want our lives to work out exactly as we’ve planned them, they just won’t. There’s no way of knowing what life is going to throw at us next.

It’s okay to go to a four-year college. It’s okay to go to a trade school. It’s okay to go to a community college. It’s okay to go for more or less than four years. It’s okay to drop out. It’s okay not to go at all. Believing that you need to achieve exactly what you planned on achieving isn’t a very realistic expectation. It’s completely okay to change your mind about things. People are constantly changing and growing all the time. It would be senseless to think that their goals and aspirations would remain the same.

So if you’re where I was, panicking about things taking a little longer than you thought, believing that you made a grave mistake in choosing a path to take, please remember that there’s no way of knowing how your life will progress. It’s okay not to know what you want to do for the rest of your life.