Beginning in childhood we’re asked what we want to be when we grow up. It evolves over time from unrealistic professions, like superheroes or ballerinas, to things like teachers and doctors. I had my fair share of professional dreams as a child, but in seventh grade I had my heart set on being an Emergency Room Physician. I didn’t realize until my senior year of high school that my dream would never be fulfilled and it took me even longer to realize that it would all be okay.

I planned my high school classes based on the idea that I would be taking a pre-med path in college and later go to med school. I had a heart and circulatory system diagram taped to my bathroom mirror until I memorized it, then I would tape up a new diagram. I even read medical journals for fun. Maybe I exhausted the idea of being an ER Physician at a young age, but one day I woke up and wondered if that was really what I wanted. I signed up for a marine science class during my last semester of senior year, fell in love, and was assured that I did not, in fact, want to be a doctor. The plan that I thought I had written in stone disintegrated before I knew it.

Of course I could have pursued my original dream, but my whole heart wasn’t there so I couldn’t make myself commit to something that would be so rigorous and demanding. It seemed horrible at first; I felt as though I wasted my time in high school with all of my science classes and I shouldn’t have focused on it so much. I could have had more of a social life instead of reading medical journals in my spare time and my grades in my normal classes could have been perfect. I told myself that I was lucky to realize that medicine wasn’t the path I wanted to follow before I even got to college, so I learned to let go of the dream that I had for six years.

After I learned to let go, I realized my love for English. As one may imagine, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my English degree, but the point is that I’m no longer trying to live up to any self-imposed expectations. I put a lot of pressure on myself at a young age to do what it takes to become an amazing doctor in the future, but with English I have never had that. I’m simply doing what I love and it makes me so much happier with my life entirely. I like to think that everything happens for a reason and unfulfilled dreams are nothing to dwell on, no matter how big or small, and that is probably the most incredible realization that I’ve ever had.

I’m eighteen years old and my unfulfilled dream left me not knowing what I want to be when I grow up. And quite frankly, that terrifies me, and probably because being a “grown up” isn’t really that far away anymore. But what stands before me is a door to any new dream I want to chase and that is something wonderful in itself.