It feels as if once you graduate college and enter the real world, everything else that comes after it moves so fast. I suddenly have no time to accomplish anything but at the same time the feeling of needing to accomplish everything and never waste a day always lingers in the back of my mind. I feel like whatever I do is never good enough, that at age 23 and graduating a semester late, I’ll always be playing catch up to the necessary life goals set by society, and ones I set myself. That checklist I have made for myself will never be complete since it seems as soon as I accomplish one thing, two more things need to be added.
Find a job and pay for my loans? Check. Eat better and go to the gym 7 days a week? Definitely check. But even when I finish a list of things by the end of the day I can’t help but lay awake and think of everything I still need to do to be on the right track in this thing called ‘life’. I understand part of the problem is me worrying too much, but it also seems like its impossible to get anywhere no matter how hard I try.
Like with law school. I did everything right, I took the LSAT and did well, I poured my soul out into my personal statement, and I got recommendations from three professors that I had built great relationships with. My applications are ready, besides me hitting send. But just like everything in life, it’s not that simple. After weeks of sleepless nights trying to figure out a way to pay for the extremely high costs of law school and speaking to numerous adults wiser than I am, I realized there is no answer besides taking on thousands and thousands of dollars of more debt. And I just can’t do it. My parents can’t cosign any more loans as they’re worried about their own savings and retirement in a few years and no bank in their right mind is going to lend me 50 thousand. Yeah, I get I’ll probably get scholarship money, but there’s also a great chance I’ll lose that scholarship after the first year. And no way can I go to law school full time and work a job that pays enough for me to afford tuition and my undergraduate loans.
So here I sit, with all six of my law school applications complete unable to hit send. I had to make the decision to wait, just like it seems I have to do with most big choices in my life currently. In college I thought I had my future all figured out, but now I'm not so sure. Hopefully, the goal of being under 30 when I finally get my law degree still isn’t too far out of reach.
It’s not just law school, it seem like everything I want and hope for in life is so far out of reach and that each day I just fall more and more behind everyone else. That everyone has it more together than me. I have people from all angles telling me I’m dumb and immature for how I decide to deal with my epilepsy. And that now I'm done college it's time grow up about it. That my decision to not go on medication is dangerous and is hurting me, and people around me. So do I listen to everyone else’s opinion of me or finally listen to myself? No one understands what the medication I took during my childhood did to me and how it affected me. No one wants to listen to my concern for lasting side effects that can occur, not even neurologists. In the past 365 days I’ve had one seizure, which I can say without a doubt was due to extreme stress. So when I decide to take control of my situation by eating better and exercising intensely at the gym every day to hopefully stress less and control my seizures, I’m still told I’m dumb. And if I can’t find a way to control my stress and in turn control my seizures, then the dream of law school is gone too and high tuition costs will be the least of my problems.
Moving forward and getting ahead in life while trying to please others seems to be a losing battle. I’ll never be the type of person that can just forget what others think and do what I feel is best, even though I realize this is a major flaw in my personality.
And another among the many of flaws I understand I have is the need to help others and make sure everyone else is okay and happy before myself. I spend more hours worried about friends and family than I do on my own worth. My brother alone has caused me to have too many sleepless nights to count. He shares his insecurities and fears with me and I feel like I can’t go to sleep until I figure out how to fix them and make them go away. Everything he says he feels right now I’ve experienced time and time again, and it makes me sick to know someone else is having to go through them too. Loneliness and the feeling of not being good enough sucks, but I know I’m strong enough to pull through and move forward, even if it feels like a losing battle sometimes. It crushes me to see someone I love go through the feelings I’ve experienced during some of my darkest days. But what is even harder is realizing no matter what I say or do, I can’t make it better or fix it. I can be there for them, but I can’t take those feelings away.
It hurts me when I can’t even do the one thing that gives me the most purpose correctly, and that’s helping others be happy. Ever since finishing college and returning home I feel as if nothing I do is right or enough. In college I had a purpose, and now it feels as if I don’t. No decision I make is the right one, and I’ll never get ahead of it all. How can I move forward in my life, let alone help others when I barely have enough time in the day to sleep, go to work and go to the gym? Right now it seems like with everything, life is winning, and I’m losing badly.
So do I worry about law school and my health, or the happiness of others? And don’t even get me started on the subject of meeting the ‘one’. Every adult in my life tells me I should spend more focus on finding the right guy, instead of watching CNN at night. That being alone should be my biggest fear right now, not how I'm going to pay for law school. So I open bumble to find a message from a guy asking for nudes or saying something else equally inappropriate, to which I roll my eyes and continue watching CNN. So I can't say I agree, but that discussion is definitely for a different day. Since the only thing I know for certain is not all of my life goals seem possible. And forget all the little things I have on my self-made checklist, as I’m sure most will never make it off the paper.
