I never thought the day would come. The day that most wait for, the day that depicts the first sign of aging in our lives. This day is special because of everything you know about yourself at this age and everything you don’t know. This is the time of our lives when we learn a lot about ourselves, who we are and experience things for the first time.

I am officially 21, and I still feel like my child self, the little gap-toothed girl who played with Bratz and stole all my older sister’s clothing when she wasn’t looking. I expected for my 21-year-old self to be a confident, courageous person who knew exactly who she was and where she was going in my life. At this age, I expected to know everything about myself and know what makes me tick, knowing my source of motivation that gets me up every morning.

The image I depicted for my future self was a person who was young but poised, stable and professional. I was naïve, and innocent believing that I knew who I was going to be as my 21-year-old self.

I believed that life followed a straight forward path that would go accordingly with every plan I had for myself. The truth is that the results of your life vary in a large spectrum of complex changes and life experiences. Life takes you places, near and far, dark and light places that will enlighten your path of life. You become different, you may not see it as it happens but slowly you are morphed into a beautiful, uniquely, crafted human that has knowledge and power.

I don’t know much about myself right now, but here is what I know (so far):

I am not poised at all, and I catch myself stumbling on words due to my overloaded brain full of a plethora of thoughts and ideas. I am scattered in a million little puzzle pieces trying to figure things out about myself. I try to figure out why I do a certain thing and why I don’t do something I use to do. I give myself many tasks and goals and any achievement seems to never be enough for me. I fidget. Life seems good some days and some days I feel like I am going nowhere.

But, what I also know is that I am the person I want to be right now. A person full of hope and faith.

I am twenty-one years old. I don’t know who I am yet, but I do know that the future has something grand in store for me. For now, we figure out the puzzle pieces as we go -- that’s what life is all about.