In first grade, I said I wanted to be a scientist—just your generic, science-mongering do-gooder. I have no idea why I told people that. Maybe I thought it sounded solid, practical. There was lab work to be done and dead animals to dissect. But I had (and have) no interest in science and proceeded to flip through a catalogue of careers: cartoonist, illustrator, construction worker, someone who reads books to see if they’d make good movies, novelist, journalist, poet, director, screenwriter, playwright.
One would think that by college I would have settled down, or at least become a little less indecisive. Nope. I change what I want to do all the time. Sometimes I want to be an English professor, other days I want to drop out of college to become a TV writer. As you can probably tell, there is a connection between these career aspirations—my love of books and words and writing—but that still doesn’t mean I have any clue what I want to do. Everything sounds tantalizing.
I envy those who are more multifaceted than me (as in, people who can do anything beyond read and write, who have multiple interests in various fields), but at the same time I can only imagine how much more overwhelming their career options are. I’m only good at one thing, and here I am, fretting about the diverging paths within this one discipline.
And it’s not only work that stresses me out: I have no idea about any aspect of the future. I don’t know who will still be in my life in the next four or five years, or where I will end up living, or which classes I will take. I have spent so much of my life trying to compress this feeling of uncertainty into something manageable by mapping out my future, any and all scenarios, and yet I still find myself unmoored.
One of the most important developments of my maturation has been the grasping of this uncertainty, almost nearing toward an embrace. I’m not sure what shifted in me, but I am not constantly frightened by the future as much anymore. I attempt to go with the flow, let things happen the way they will happen, and not control everything so meticulously. I like where I am—I don’t want to disturb the peace by projecting my fears onto the near future.
