It's in a female's very nature to want organization and control over the events in their life. So, unsurprisingly we make lists for everything like packing, classes, closet inventory, and groceries. Compartmentalizing our lives just makes it easier to handle and helps us to not pull our hair out when we have a lot of things on our plate. But what about when the lists in your life become compulsive? What if those lists become the only way that you can feel calm? I want to share how my organization has helped me succeed and simultaneously been the bane of my existence so that maybe someone can relate.

I have a competitive, compulsive, and obsessive "too much gene", as I like to call it (credit to Jenna Marbles for coming up with the term). This means that I'm the perfect person to ask to go skydiving, but also a very neurotic person because I have to know every little thing going on in my life. And lists are my answer to that yearning for control.

In high school, I was great at making outlines for papers, listing all of my assignments, and keeping up with my friends' birthdays. Teachers liked my color coordination and my unique graphic organizers. While perfectionist tendencies kept me focused on school and kept my grades up, it also seeped into how I perceived life.

One of the craziest things about me is that since I seriously started to think about adulthood, I've felt that I needed to have a plan. I was looking at colleges and majors well before high school even started. And like any little girl is raised to think, I've had a cringe-worthy "Dream Wedding" Pinterest board since ninth grade. The thought of getting to any certain point in life, from moving out to going to Walmart, and not knowing what I'm doing creates a sharp feeling of panic in my chest.

The worst thing someone could do is show me a list of how things are supposed to go and then tell me that I'm ill-equipped to follow it. Ah! This very thing happened to me when I was signing up for college classes. Most majors have a flow chart for the classes you need to take in order to complete your degree. So, I saw this flow chart that has every semester mapped out for you and found out that for some subjects that I needed to complete my degree, I wasn't even on the map. Double ah! No one told me that instead of taking AP Statistics twelfth grade year I should've taken Calculus.

I signed up for what I could and left feeling like I was already behind. Normal people would've done all of that and thought nothing of it. But in my mind, my five-year plan was in potential jeopardy of being stretched out to a six-year plan. So, how did I cope with it? I took a copy of the flowchart and made a new one for myself, one that's personalized to me.

I lament all of this because I know there's a student out there just like me who will feel so behind and so insecure about their success. And you should know that it's okay to go with the flow of life. Not everything can be a plan and don't panic if a monkey wrench gets thrown in any plan that you have. Pick your head up and do whatever you need to do to get to whatever end goal you have.