Schooling was never forced upon me by my family. Learning has always been at the forefront of my life, and I've always known what I've wanted to do since a young age.
1. Get good grades
2. Go to college in New York
3. Become a neurologist
It was one of the things that I most admired about myself. I had it all figured out. While my classmates would wonder what classes to take because they didn't know what they were going to do in the next two years, I would already be taking summer classes to get ahead and watching college dorm videos on youtube. I would ask myself questions like "Should I attend medical school in New York or Georgia?" and "What should my doctorate thesis be based upon?" College was my destiny.
However, as I get closer and closer to graduation, I find myself second guessing everything that I've always thought was meant for me. Instead of seeing working in a hospital as my dream, I'm starting to see it as another endless routine that I will have to stick to until I retire. It is starting to become a dreadful fate rather than the long-anticipated finish line.
The good thing is that I know what my passion is: neurology and psychology. The bad thing is that is that I don't know what to do with that passion. Along with the gift of being a fast learner, I'm also very creative. I could be filming a documentary on how society affects your neurological chemistry, or I could be working long hours examining patients. There are endless possibilities when it comes to what I can do with my life. All of those options are amazing in their own ways, but I want to do them all and the harder I think about it, the more impossible it seems.
Let's say that I decided to dedicate my life to making documentaries about the brain and how it interacts with society. Who will fund it? Will it be successful? What do I do if it isn't? There are so many things that could go wrong. If I decide to go to college, who says that I will pass, who says that I won't change my mind later in life. That's basically two-thirds of my life full of sleepless nights studying and additional classes in the summer that would amount to nothing.
But then I realized something. I was thinking so far into the future, that I was ruining the thing that makes life so special: you didn't know what was going to happen next. I internalized my fears so much that they were starting to become reality, and it took away the surprise of what was going to happen next in my life.
Do I know exactly what I want to do with my life? No, but that's ok. I still have these fears and I don't know whether or not I will go down the road that I thought was paved for me, but that's life I guess.