When I was younger, I thought that I would have it all figured out. I thought that my plan (college, job, life) would come easily. The plan I decided, needed to be completed in order for me to live a wonderful, perfect, well-rounded life. I thought that I would be so sure of each decision I made that there would be no room left to wonder if I should have chosen differently. Now, at 22, I can’t believe how incorrect I was. I will be getting my diploma in the mail at the end of the month, just a piece of paper. No guarantees came with my education, no job I assumed I would have set up the day I graduated, no apartment in the city I pictured moving into. What took me much too long to figure out was, it’s okay to not know what the next step is. It’s okay to not be sure.
It is so easy to assume that everyone knows what they are doing; to see the Facebook status’s of friends backpacking through Europe, starting their big corporate jobs, starting their own companies, writing music, starring in stage productions, traveling the world. From the confines of our computer and cell phone screens, everyone’s life looks like a beautifully edited Instagram post, complete with #Blessed hashtags. Is this what we are to believe real life looks like? Real life is so much more than what we choose to share on the internet, it’s not as flawless and perfect. Real life can be messy and decisions can be hard to come to, being sure is a wonderful feeling, being confident in what you are doing and where you are going is a privilege, but being unsure may be a blessing in itself. Being unsure gives you freedom.
We currently live in a world that cycles through goals like laundry. Each time a goal is met, it is not celebrated as a monumental victory, it is only replaced with a new goal, a higher goal. We go to high school and choose great colleges and go into great debt so we can get jobs and be rich, and eventually have enough money to do the things that we want. Why can’t we do the things that we want now? When my grandma finally retired from teaching, reaching the point where children moved out and grandma and grandpa finally had the time and means to do what they desired, my grandparents discovered my grandpa had Leukemia. Instead of searching for stars over the ocean, instead of finding beautiful places, cancer was found swimming through his veins.
This all makes me wonder why we hunger for money, for jobs, for the expected, as if any other path would be lethal? Being unsure is okay, taking the time to find out what you love and what you want is so much greater than anything a mediocre job could give to you. To live is what shapes us. So what if you don’t know what your next step is, what you want to be when you grow up, how do you want to feel? What do you want to see? To say? Say it. Do it. Nothing is promised, not a single day. Now is the time to live, the rest can be figured out later.
