“You can be anything you want to be.” It’s what we’ve been told our entire lives: go out and chase our dreams. We’ve been told that we can do anything as long as we set our mind to it. It sounds so simple, right? Love what you love and keep doing it until you can’t do it any longer. Then you’ll have a happy life.
Sure, you can be anything you want to be -- until you get to college. Then you have to make sure that thing you want to be can pay the bills and provide decent health benefits.
When you grow older, reality sets in. Suddenly, people are expecting you to get yourself together and know what you want to do with your life. At seventeen years old, you’re being forced to begin figuring it all out. And no one wants to hear your big, lifelong dream. They want to hear your stable, supportive plan. They want to hear that you are looking towards a practical life, not an “outrageous” one.
So, why is this? If all anyone wants to do is follow their dreams and be happy, why are people so afraid of going after what they want? One of the biggest conceived notions about following your wildest dreams is that you’re setting yourself up for failure. People are too afraid to put themselves out there and be vulnerable because they are afraid of not succeeding. Society puts people under outstanding pressure to meet a certain expectation and make something of themselves.
This unbearable pressure is especially put on people coming of age and in college. Young and impressionable people just looking to find something that they love. Maybe they already know what they love and are looking to perfect it through school. While you’re told to find what you love in college, all it does it push you to figure out what you want to do. And fast. You have to declare a major and take all of the necessary classes so that you can make it out into the real world, all in a four-year time span. But there is a dark cloud looming over your head at the same time. A voice from behind you keeps whispering that you have to be enough. The voice tells you that you have to be better.
In a money-driven society, obsessed with instant gratification, young people are petrified to step out of the line that was drawn for them by someone else. There is no time to fail in the world we live in today. Students need to graduate college and go right into the working world, into a profession that they aren’t even sure they want. But you have to get the job that will give you money and success. Life expects something out of you. You have standards you need to meet. Life expects you to have a good job, a stable income, and a future that can support you and a potential family one day. There is no room for error or failure in the plan. You have to be normal. A cookie cutter image of success. Anything else would be too risky.
How can you take a risk when the world is watching, telling you that you cannot fail? How can you take a leap of faith towards your dreams when nothing is certain? How can you risk the comfortability of your future?
When I declared my major and told myself that I was going to pursue being a writer, I was petrified. Here I am, a year later, and I’m still petrified. I’m scared every day that 10 years from now, I won’t be the writer that I want to be. I’m afraid that I won’t be enough and I’ll fail. But with that, every day I keep going. I refuse to give up on my dream because it's what I have wanted my entire life. Even when people look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them I want to be a writer, I brush it off. Because even if I’m not where I want to be in ten years, I’ll keep going. Because there is nothing else in my life that I would rather be doing, so why wouldn’t I try?
Everyone is afraid of uncertainty. But uncertainty is a fact of life. You’re never going to know what comes next or what is waiting for you around the corner. Taking risks is scary, but they are necessary. You don’t want to live an average, passionless life. No one does. You want to live a life worth telling about. You want to live a life that makes you proud when you look back on it. Not one wants to look back on their life and regret not following their dreams. A recent social experiment shows that one of the biggest regrets in people’s lives is exactly that. They looked back on their life and wish they had become who they wanted to be.
Don’t be the person who looks back and wished they did more. Don’t get to the end of your life and wish that you become more. Don’t live your life in fear of what might come next. Failure is always a possibility, but you shouldn’t let it hold you back. Be prepared for anything, but don’t be afraid of uncertainty. Embrace it and enjoy it. You don’t want to know what will happen next because that takes the excitement out of life.
You can be anything you want to be. Don’t be afraid of it. Follow your dreams and never apologize for it, because your dreams are who you are. And you can’t live a full life without being who you really are. You’ll never know what could have been if you don’t try.
