This year I’ve had one of the biggest and most life-changing realizations of my life: no one knows what they’re doing. Spring term is here and at the end of this term, I will no longer be attending my current school. I go to the University of Oregon, and I haven’t been here for all three years of college that I have accomplished.

My first university was all the way in Paris, France. I’m not French, and I had no real reason to go there other than the fact that I wanted to get far from the life I knew in southern California. When I was in France I shared an apartment with five other people from different parts of the world. I learned a lot there. I figured out what kind of people I get along with, I figured out that second languages are one of the hardest things for me to tackle, and that I really do love film.

So, I took my psychology and English to just English degree goal back to the United States. I didn’t go back to California, I still wasn’t ready to come “home.” So, when I got accepted to the University of Oregon, I moved to Eugene, Oregon. Here, I took my English major, added a cinema studies major alongside it, dropped my English major, and turned it into a minor.

I’m highlighting all these degree changes because each of them came with this existential dread that I am still learning how to cope with. I love humans, how we interact with ourselves and each other, our biological makeup, and the way we express all we are and all everyone else is in art. Being a visual person with some mediocre skills in music, writing, acting, and dancing, film has just always made sense.

So, when I fully committed to it, it was scary.

Psychology is more stable, there’s always need for more research and there are just so many facets I could’ve gone into. English came from my almost obsessive compulsions of reading, analyzing, and discussing that would make me a great teacher. But, film is something I choose to do in my everyday life and always has.

Film is also really volatile. The business is ugly, and there are absolutely zero guarantees. Now, for a number of reasons, I have to bid this school adieu a year before I was originally set to graduate.

I don’t know exactly where I’m going. I don’t know anything about anything in my future. With fall admissions already passed, I will most likely not graduate on time. I am going to move back to southern California, despite all my urges to look away.

And, that’s OK.

It really is.

I transferred to this school knowing less about myself than now when I’m gearing up to leave. I learned I really am good at what I want to do and that I want to do more than I ever knew before. I am a lot more social than I realized, and no one is judging my every decision. I need to breathe when I make the wrong ones because that is just life.

I used to think I had to follow this four-year college formula, move somewhere else, and get an internship that will turn into a job that I will either love or hate. Then, maybe I'll have a family, and one day, when I’m 50 I’ll start teaching. But I realized, that’s so limiting to myself.

I want to do things unconventionally. I want to struggle and thrive. I want to push myself into situations I wouldn’t have imagined myself in before. I’m going to take more than four years to get a bachelor’s degree. I am going to eat ice cream while I sit on my living room floor and think about how the successful people I look up to in the film industry probably went through the same existential anguish and dread of having absolute responsibility for ourselves, with no right path, in a world where no one really knows what they’re doing. And it’s really OK.