I had that sinking feeling for years: the "what am I even doing with my life?" feeling. Everyone was telling me that it wasn't necessary to know what I was doing with my life when I started college, but I just couldn't get comfortable with that idea.
I grew up knowing what I wanted in life -- to be sure about things the way my mom and dad were sure. Both of my parents knew in their teens what careers they wanted to have.
I, however, spent most of my senior year in high school declaring that I didn’t know what I was even interested in anymore. Most of my friends had at least some inclination to what field they were going into, and I didn't. The worst part of this for me, being someone who likes to plan, was having no clue of what to put on college applications. I began to just choose a different major for every university I applied to. In one case, an undecided major, in another, an industrial designer or psychologist, in another, an elementary school teacher, and in another, a secondary school teacher. At one point, I forgot which major I applied to for each school.
Near the end of high school, I made sure to reconnect with a couple of my teachers- especially my Honors English teacher who taught me my junior year. She was always an inspiration to me, and I came to the conclusion that I should become a teacher. So leaving high school and braving the world, I made a decision: I’d follow a path like hers and become an English teacher.
English is something I’ve always been passionate about, and even though I’m now a Humanities and not an English major, my concentration could possibly be in English. I’m only a month and a bit into college, and I’m already learning about so many different fields of work and interests. I’ve discovered my favorite century of literature, learned that I'm much more competent in math than I thought I was, and I even like history, which I'd never enjoyed back in high school.
This realization has once again left me looking at the "what am I doing with my life?" question. Only this time, something’s different. This time, I see potential and opportunity, instead of my obligatory response of “I don’t know” or “I don’t care” when I was asked this back in high school. I’m still interested in some sort of teaching, and it would be probably in English, but I’m finding that history could open some doors for me as well. And there’s still my love for art, which I could always minor in.
To make this brief: to any high school students wondering what they’re going to do with their life, and feeling like they’re meant to do nothing as I did in my senior year, it gets better. This sounds cheesy, but I’m not kidding.
Most people usually know what they don't want to do if nothing else, and in some ways, this can help with the stress of narrowing down college majors. If you don’t know what you want to do, but know you've never liked biology, don’t take classes based heavily in bio. Sometimes by learning what you don’t like, you can learn what you do like. I’m lucky to have the opportunity to really find what I love in university, and without my past high school experiences of frustration and questioning, I don’t think I would have been able to get to this point of discovery.
So, be grateful for moments of not knowing, and for moments of feeling annoyed with yourself. If you don’t know what you want to do in life, you don’t! And that realization is sometimes just enough to trigger the path that you’re destined for to become a little clearer.
