Hello this post is kind of a mess – it’s just a jumble of thoughts I’ve been having recently about my future and my inability to plan it. I’m really curious about what your thoughts are on this topic so feel free to share in the comments!!
Picture your future. What do you see? Four years of college that end in a bachelor’s degree and a job in some distant city? Maybe you see eight to ten years of school that end in a white lab coat and a heart monitor. Perhaps you see yourself in bunker gear, hosing down fire after fire. Or maybe you’re like me and you see nothing at all; just an empty black abyss. Every successful person seems to stress the importance of “having a vision” or “setting a goal.” They say that to get to where they are, they needed to be able to picture this reality decades ago. As someone who doesn’t work well with absolutes, this idea has always been frightening to me: how can I tie myself down to an image I see in my head?
Something about narrowing down what I want to do with my future leaves me feeling awfully claustrophobic, like I’m trying to squeeze myself into a small box. I feel my throat constrict and my head spin itself into a piercing ache. But not having it narrowed down makes me feel like I’m throwing darts in the dark, firing shots in every direction with no particular aim or purpose. So which one of these is better? The aimless shots or the small, insufficient box? I can’t really say I’ve got an answer.
What I’ve come to hate even more than planning out my future is talking about it with others. Some conversations leave me feeling utterly unprepared, like I am not approaching my future correctly. But is there really a correct way to approach your future? If so, who made the outline? What makes them credible enough to be the blueprint? These conversations leave me feeling like I need to figure everything out right now, like I need to map out my future the way I map out the lives of the characters that live in my book. Mostly, they leave me feeling inadequate, as if just because I don’t have a plan for my future, it’s going to be bleak and unsuccessful. The expectation of that failure weighs down on me more than I’d like to admit. Other conversations evoke the exact opposite; they leave me with a sense of security – I’m told things like “you’re smart, you’ll be okay” or “I’m sure you will be fine in whatever you do.” These conversations leave me feeling warm and recognized, but they also produce an undercurrent of fear: What if I let them down? What if I don’t live up to their expectations? What if I only end up disappointing them? Again, I don’t really have an answer to any of these questions.
At times like this, when I don’t seem to have an answer to any of my own questions, I’m reminded that I don’t have to have one. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t work well with absolutes and sometimes – a lot of the time – the answers to my questions are open-ended and not multiple choice. I’m reminded that even though I may not know if it’s better to have your future planned or to be more spontaneous, as long as I trust that I’ll do what works best for me, I don’t have to know what the “right” answer is. And as long as I trust that I’ll do what is best for me, I only have to worry about whether I live up to my own expectations regardless of whether I fall short or surpass somebody else’s. As long as I trust myself, the uncertainty doesn’t matter because I know that I will get myself to where I need to be, even if I don’t entirely know what that looks like so it’s alright to step into that empty black abyss and embrace it; to pierce it one day at a time.
