It’s okay not to be okay. To be unsure. It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to be scared.
My entire life has been keeping time to a different drum. The music that coordinates my life has simply been on a different rhythm since as long as I can remember. I wore bikinis to preschool in Wisconsin winters. I refused to conform to ‘normal’ dress codes from pretty much day one. I was more independent, more self-reliant than most of my friends. I wasn’t afraid to make a stand against something that put me on the outside.
The rhythm became even more off from the common beat by events completely out of my control. I dealt with an extremely negative relationship early on, completely swinging the path of my life in a different direction. I got very sick, giving me an entirely different teenage experience than 95 percent of people I know. I went into college ready for a “regular” life and realized I wasn’t as healthy as I thought. I was still sick, forcing me to withdraw from school my second semester. Everyone was out partying and I was stuck in a hospital being refed. When I went back to school, I once again landed in the hospital, and I had to withdraw from a few of my classes. Even when I came back, healthier and stronger, I couldn’t shake the feeling deep inside of me that my music, whatever the hell had been guiding my life, was so clearly broken. I was convinced. I didn’t have a major or a clue what I wanted to do. I had an awful GPA from semesters of zero energy. I was watching my peers get into amazing programs, score incredible internships, and living the dream college life. And then there was me.
I was behind in school, I felt isolated, and I felt like a failure. As a horrible perfectionist, this was eating away at me. Over the years I’ve learned to curb some things—my outfit can be just ok sometimes, my notes can have a few scribbles, but my entire life, or what I perceived to be, my entire life? That was not okay.
I became anxious, consumed by my impending pathetic future. I was so hung up on what I saw as essentially a death sentence that I didn’t even bother to realize that 75% of the people around me were in the same boat. Not exactly, of course, but most didn’t have a clue either. They had failed a course, or messed up their credits, or transferred, or gotten sick. We spend so much time looking at the anomalies that we forget that most people are secretly struggling just like us. There is no normal path.
One day, I encountered a quote that struck me. It was from Misty Copeland, a talented African-American ballerina. She had said, “Know that you can start late, look different, be uncertain, and still succeed.” She’s spoken out many times about being different and forging your own path, due to her experiences in the professional dance world, but it had never impacted me this strongly. I started to see little by little how this was true; How, in reality, I would not be in undergraduate college for seven years. I would, someday, get a job.
It wasn’t until I got accepted into my undergraduate school within the university that I realized that things were going to be okay. I would have to graduate a semester late, but since I withdrew from one and a half semesters, it’s not technically late and that’s the best I can ask for.
If I had known that things were going to span out how they did, maybe I wouldn’t have worried so much. Or, maybe, if I had truly taken to heart what people said, I would have saved myself hours of tears. But it’s okay. It’s okay to be unsure, it’s okay to cry. It’s okay to be scared of the future, because, no matter what age and what stage in life we are, everyone is. But it’s also important to remember that you will succeed. Copeland’s quote is something I firmly believe everyone should have bookmarked, printed out, and posted on their fridge. We all need to hear it sometime. Your life may not be following the same timeline as anyone else’s, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong timeline. On time is your time.
In the end, my record isn’t broken. It’s my own, that’s for sure. I definitely still do not dance to the same drum as everyone, but that doesn’t mean it won’t take me where I need to be.
