Okay, so you've just graduated high school. What a bittersweet time to spend with your fellow classmates of the last four to maybe even 12 years of your life. But now it's time to answer the question that everyone around us is asking... "What's Next?"
Here we've been, living in the same routine of hitting snooze on that alarm clock at the same time each and every day. Spending our mornings with the same people in the same homeroom for four years every day. We've got our teachers personalities figured out, and have probably established a group of friends whom we'll be texting and relying on each day for anything from moral support to just finding out what kind of smoothies they're selling at lunch today. We've been living in this community of being a "high schooler" where we have been having the best four years of our lives as most adults will tell us and enjoying the Friday night lights at the football games or the refreshing slush at the baseball games. However, not each and every one of us have had that typical high school experience. Some of us have happily gone through the first stages of figuring out who we really are and what we might continue to be, some have lost who they thought they were just to find out they were someone so much better than that, and some have just tried to wiggle their way through this maze just to survive. Whichever experience you may have gone through, it was a step into leading your next chapter.
But now, we are adults as they say. We need to start thinking our future, they say. We need to figure out What's Next. THEN...
"Have you chosen a school?"
"What are you majoring in AND is that going to make you a lot of money?"
"What kind of career do you want?"
These are just a sample of the handfuls of questions that us newly graduated high schoolers receive in the short time span of summer we have before we start our next journey. Yet, not all of us are on that same journey of choosing a school, a major, and even a career option. And that's OKAY. So many of us may feel the pressure to be on the same boat with everyone else who seem to have their plans "all figured out" but surely that is not the case at all. Whichever path we have gone down in high school was our own in an individual way and whichever we will go down afterwards is again, our own in an individual way. I want to send a message to all my fellow graduates: you've just completed the first step of entering adulthood and now you have decades left, DON'T STRESS ABOUT WHAT'S NEXT JUST YET. The pressure us eighteen year olds put ourselves through can be overwhelming, but in the end all we can do is live in the moment and hope for the best.
