My answer to those who ask me what kind of career I want after graduation usually sounds something like “your guess is as good as mine.” I really have no idea what I want out of this university experience, and there are so many things that I feel like I should be doing. Internships, classes, volunteering, jobs – all of these question marks can add up and feel very daunting.
It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff and not knowing what’s below you, but knowing that you have to get down there somehow. And even though we usually know that making our way down will make things a little more clear with every step we take, we often choose to stay up at the top instead and avoid the unknown altogether. But, of course, we can’t stay at the comfortable top forever – time keeps marching on and we don’t have a choice but to follow it. We have to make it to the bottom somehow; either time pushes us there or we get down on our own accord.
It’s easy to let the unknown paralyze us and make us wary and afraid of trying new things and to let our potential shrink into ourselves. But in order to find out what’s best for us, whether in terms of school, work, or personal issues, we have to start taking steps to figure it out.
It sucks. I get it. Dragging myself out of bed to do my schoolwork or find a job or internship takes a pretty absurd amount of energy most of the time. I would love to just sleep and hang out with my friends 24/7, but I know that living that way wouldn’t fulfill me in the way that doing something I’m truly passionate about would. Even if I don’t know what that thing is, I do know that picking up my feet and making something happen will help me figure it out. We all have lazy days, and that’s fine – but pretending that every day is a lazy Sunday is not as fun as it seems.
Sometimes our friends seem to have it all together. They volunteer, they work, they get good grades, they have an idea what they want to do in life, and that’s great. We shouldn’t compare ourselves to others and put ourselves down just because we’re at different spots in our own journeys. No two paths look the same, and we all navigate our own trails differently. At the end of the day, the most important thing that we need to do is trust our choices and keep going even when it seems easier to stay put. We shouldn’t dwell on these decisions until they make us sick, and we definitely shouldn’t allow them to scare us out of our own potential. Everything always falls into place if we just allow it to.