As a college student entering my junior year, I often have to answer questions. This is a predicament many young people in their early twenties find themselves in. Questions about my major, university, and romantic life abound from all angles, but one question persists: “What do you want to do after graduation?”
What are you going to do?
I come from highly organized, overachieving, and future-oriented parents. My mother was the valedictorian of her collegiate class. My father pursued and earned his juris doctorate almost immediately after completing his undergraduate degree. Thus, from an early age, I’ve understood the importance of creating and acheiving goals, of “hard work.”
Yet, these lessons fail to soothe the pit of anxiety that forms in my stomach each time the future comes knocking on my deadlocked door.
Career aspirations of mine have come and gone; as a girl, I swore I’d be a veterinarian, but I soon after found out that animals don’t live forever, and deemed that clause of the job irreconcilable. I moved through academic interests in political science, journalism, and film studies before I landed where I somehow always knew I would: English. I graduated high school clueless as to my far-away, future professional life, but certain that my confidence in my major would lead me to where I was “meant to be.”
I am as clueless as I was then. The “do” of that question ticks in my mind as a demented reminder of time running out.
Potential paths my life could take flash through my mind like film shots.
1) Get a juris doctorate and become an attorney. Get married and make “good money.” Rent an apartment in Manhattan that has an elevator and someone who pushes its buttons for me. Eventually migrate to suburbia in New Jersey or Connecticut, but remain committed to my job. Have kids, hire a nanny. Have a massive retirement account.
2) Take the corporate route. Stay in my hometown, commute to Manhattan for work. Sit in cubicles with grey, plastic walls that have pictures of my partner and family Scotch-taped to them. Fall asleep to the rhythm of gel nails typing on a laptop. Live for the weekends and Christmas holidays.
3) Venture somewhere new to get a PhD, then settle down where I can teach.
4) Buy a one-way ticket to the Midwest and wake up with cattle and fresh air each day.
Start a business, own a business, make money, be happy, prioritize family, prioritize career, chase the wide, open spaces, walk to my favorite cafe, a local bookstore, and my office in less than a half hour.
When the film ends, I find myself disoriented, confused, and entirely uncertain of my ability to make the right choice.
Rachel Simmons and Adrienne Kortas published a remarkable piece last February in the Harvard Business Review discussing the “broken rung” on women’s career ladders in particular, and how the notion of ambition itself has been gatekept and sustained in accordance with male needs, rather than those of females. They reference several responsibilities that often disproportionately fall onto women outside the workplace, including care for children, the elderly, and other miscellaneous necessary obligations. Indeed, when I reflect on my future professional life, I consider not only myself but my future dependents, charting out how my career would allow me to continue to hold what and who I love in a place of priority. Oftentimes, it feels impossible.
The American definition of oneself as their professional actions is a tidal wave that Generation Z has been ceaselessly treading. Admittedly, I often find myself “doom scrolling” through TikTok, where I’m met with hundreds of people telling me the best way to be, to do, and that anyone who disagrees with them has got it wrong. These ideas I was raised with, of “hard work” and what is “meant to be,” have been swapped out in favor of terrifying assurances that I will amount to near nothing if I don’t “know my vision,” “chart my path,” “play my cards right.” When did living a meaningful life, one I can be happy within and proud of, become a fight, a game? Can I opt-out, should I opt-out? Is the game inevitable? Could I afford to live without it?
The last time my friends and I discussed the future of our lives, we were cross-legged on my dorm room floor. I had heated water in an electric kettle to prepare tea for us; my quad mates and I pooled our mugs to have enough for everyone. In the dim yellow light, one of my friends, as an EMT, shared how they’d almost always known they would work in the medical field. My partner nodded in content agreement. Two others, on track for degrees in Nursing and Occupational Therapy, expressed a similar dream, and will no doubt achieve it. Another friend explained her plan to become a writer, and this made me smile. The last friend of this group does not speak up, and neither do I. We wait for the inevitable.
The writer says, “Well, Faith?”
“I don’t know, probably law school.”
“Booo”s bounce off of painted cinderblock walls.
“We all know that’s not what you want,” my partner says.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter what I want, it just matters if I can support myself.” They come out soft and resigned, the words I’ve carved into each and every one of my dreams. I stir my tea.
The friend who hasn’t spoken and I lock eyes, and we understand each other.
I am an almost-twenty-year-old. I don’t claim to know the infallible answers to any of the questions I’ve asked. What I do know is that I cannot tread water forever, and the day will come when I will have to make a decision, choose my path. Find out what it is exactly I will be doing with the rest of my “wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver would say.
I suppose that’s why the choice is so frightening; this life is “wild” and “precious.” I’m unsure if I’m ready to care for it.