A couple of weeks after the semester ended, I had a conversation with my parents. The same conversation that we always seemed to have — the same one they had with both of my older brothers and were soon to have with my younger sisters.
It was the inevitable "what do you want to do with your life" question and for me, that answer had always been constant since I entered middle school. I was going to go to med school and end up being a doctor.
Prior to that, I dabbled on being a fairy princess, a traveler, an author, and an astronaut (one time when I was younger, I overheard my mom saying that she wanted to see Earth from outer space so eight year old me made it a promise that I was going to become an astronaut just to do that but that didn't really work out).
For a while now, I've been having doubts about my future.
The same consistent answer I used to always give about what I wanted to do turned from a statement, into more of a question that slowly inched itself up my throat in hesitation. I questioned whether or not what I wanted to do was really what I was meant to do.
My parents raised my four siblings and I in a fairly religious household.
It was the constant they always taught us to go back to no matter what was happening in our lives but as we grew older, what we wanted to do with our faith became more of a matter of our own hands. Both my older brothers, for instance, slowly strayed away from the type of faith that they've known all their lives to figure out for themselves what faith really was for them.
After the conversation I had with my parents — which was really half arguing and half trying to get our points across — I asked God for a sign.
Last week, I planned a little day-in-the-city with my roommates and later on attended a Logic concert in Madison Square Garden. I ended up having to leave the concert early to try to catch the last train from Grand Central to Milford so I took an Uber back to the Station.
I normally always struck up conversations with my Uber drivers and that night, I met Michael.
He was a father of two, both teenage boys, and he had originally come here from India to pursue an education. He never really went into detail but he told me that he ended up having to give up on his education and there was not a day that passed by where he did not regret that decision.
Here he was now trying to make ends meet for his family and for his sons, one of whom was going away to college soon.
In turn, I shared with him that I had been conflicted and struggling about whether or not I should stay with my current course of study in college. I told him briefly about the relationship I had with my dad because of it and he told me as a dad, there was nothing more he wanted to see than for his children to succeed and there was close to nothing he wouldn't do to see that.
Michael shared with me a piece of advice that I think I'm going to remember for a long time coming, "what you're going through now will be nothing to the amount of pride you will have for yourself knowing how much heart and hard work you've put to your goal. Don't do what I did. Five to ten years from now, you'll thank yourself for not giving up."
As I got to Grand Central, I thanked him endlessly for the conversation we just had — it just happened to hit me the moment I needed it most in my life.
I asked God for a sign.
I have to believe that that was it.
