This year will be my last year in school. The next thing I know, I'm off to college and all the the small worries of my school days will be replaced by considerably bigger ones.
We spend the first 15 years of our lives in school having no say-so what so ever. We are integrated into a system and we are forced to adjust. Adjusting is hard in itself, but then we get used to it, and we start reveling in the ease of not having to consider all the choices and deciding which one is best and which one to go with because everything has been chosen for us.
Then we are expected to make our own decisions.
We are stormed by representatives from different universities each chanting the qualities of their own and bashing on the others'. We are introduced to a million different majors and a million different careers and are considered as undoubtedly capable of making the right choice. Sure there are student guidance offices and many loquacious employees ready to explain everything in great detail, or even try to analyse us and help us find the "perfect" major. However, if we haven't received the training necessary to be able to search within ourselves and define who we are, our preferences, our ambitions, how can we expect someone else to be able to do that?
We are stormed by representatives from different universities each chanting the qualities of their own and bashing on the others'. We are introduced to a million different majors and a million different careers and are considered as undoubtedly capable of making the right choice. Sure there are student guidance offices and many loquacious employees ready to explain everything in great detail, or even try to analyse us and help us find the "perfect" major. However, if we haven't received the training necessary to be able to search within ourselves and define who we are, our preferences, our ambitions, how can we expect someone else to be able to do that?
Suddenly we have to think for ourselves and envision what the rest of our existence will look like. And even though everything we decide on when we are eighteen might change the second we go to college, or a bit later, when we graduate and set off to find a job, we still fear and believe that those choices will make or break our future. And instead of telling us that we should choose something that feels right for now and reassuring us that we can always change our minds, everyone around us only makes us feel like we are sealing the deal with the devil who's going to come asking for retribution if we don't eventually graduate with top grades in the field we chose.
No one can know for sure who they want to be so early on. It's absurd to claim that we will be able to control every single aspect of our life. Instead, we should remind ourselves that no matter how things turn out, whether it was because of choices we made or because of pure chance, we will always have the power and freedom to want to change our situation.
And where there is will there is always a way.
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