“In ten years, where do you see yourself?”
I’m sure every single person has been asked this question – by their mother, their father, their grandparents, their professors, their future employers, even by their Tinder matches. And I’m sure that 85% of people being asked this question are ready to answer with a whole narrative consisting of making partner at a law firm, or moving to New York City, or being married by age 27, or having three kids by age 30. These are all amazing life aspirations, amazing life goals, amazing life moments.
However, I don’t have them.
It’s not that I don’t want to be successful, or I don’t want to one day get married, or even, who knows, have children. I just don’t think of life as this checklist where I need to achieve this, that and the other thing by the time I reach a certain age.
Right now, I am 21 years old. Twenty-one years, three months and fourteen days old, to be exact. I have less than a year left in college, no significant romantic relationship, and no idea what I want to do when I graduate college. However, I’m more than okay with this, with not knowing where life is going to take me, with not knowing the unknown.
After spending a semester abroad in Italy (I can hear your exact thoughts, “she thinks she’s so worldly because she spent one semester abroad”) I realized that I was an entire ocean away from everyone and everything I knew. No sorority events, no figuring out what to wear to the pregame where my crush was going to be, no wondering if my fake ID will finally work at the bar. It was just me, foreign lands, new faces, and copious amounts of pasta and wine. However, those three and a half months were the best, the worst, the most challenging months of my life. I immersed myself in Italian culture, learned a new language, ate new foods, made new friends, and even made some new more-than-friends. However, not knowing where my life abroad would end up, or where I would go, or what I would see, was truly living life. There were was very little concept of time and a schedule, and I have never felt more alive than I did seeing the world without a true agenda.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong at all with wanting to “settle down” with a husband and children in a suburban New Jersey house by the time you’re 30. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to move up the ladders in one job, in one city for the rest of your life. However, I’m tired of this double standard, the receiving of sympathetic, sometimes distain looks from people that judge my life aspirations because I don’t have them on a timeline. In the timeline of my life, I want to have more than one job that can keep me on my feet and that I put my full heart and passion into, I want to love so hard that I will never picture getting married as “settling down,” I want to be so in love and secure with myself and my marriage before I even think of becoming a mother. I want to travel the world, see states and countries and lands I have never seen before, and learn as much as I possibly can in this one life I have. I have experienced and seen too many things so far in life that have truly shown me life is too short to not travel, make mistakes, and discover yourself, even if that means doing so beyond your college years, the “acceptable years.”
When I was eleven, my dad bought me a plaque that I still have on my wall at home. It’s a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, and it reads: “Do not go where the path my lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” For the past ten years, I have fallen asleep with this quote above my bed. When I make life decisions, whether it’s for my education, my career endeavors, even the friends I make or what I’m going to eat for dinner, this is the quote I think of. Though others may have chosen the same path as someone else before them and so on by certain points in their lives, it doesn’t mean that I have to also.
Photo Credits: 1, author’s own