I am 27 years old. I still do not know what I want to do with my life. I hate when people say to me, "That's okay! I know plenty of people who are 30, 40 or even 50 years old who don't know what they want to do!" And my response is always, "Oh, and are they happy? Were they happy working a meaningless job for 10+ years trying to figure out what the Hell they wanted to do? How'd that work out for them? How's their quality of life?"
When I was younger, I wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice. I wanted to be this only because I found out they couldn't get fired. Once I learned I had to first become a lawyer, I was done with that dream. For a long time after, I wanted to a pediatric cardio surgeon. I saw a special on TLC one day and decided that that was for me. Then I got to jr. high and had biology and learned that I don't handle slicing and dicing too well, in fact I have a very poor gag reflex so there went that dream. Over the course of the next few years I threw around novelist, journalist, actress, lobbyist, interpreter until I finally had a "calling". I was going to be a Pastor for the Lutheran church.
What happened to that dream was this...I was really involved in my church youth group, to the point of being on a national board. I had a problem with alcohol however and got drunk at one of our national meetings. The board booted me off (at the age of 19), and I blamed the church. How could they, after all, preach forgiveness but not keep me on the board? At the time, I didn't understand that they could forgive me but not excuse my actions. Being young and being naive often go hand-in-hand. I stepped away from the church at that point and got lost in a monumental way.
I used to believe that you needed to get lost in order to find yourself. That was my motto throughout my college years...the first time I went to college that is. I thought that if I went to a big, huge, super large university, I could lose myself within the throngs of people, the Intro to Psych class that had 800 students (seriously), the 65,000+ students on campus could help me lose who I was. The thing was, they did, the campus succeeded, I succeeded, I completely and utterly lost myself and forgot who I was, what I stood for, what I believed in and what I wanted to do with my life. I forgot that in losing myself, I needed to find myself. I thought that my college years should be spend defining who I was, making grand epiphanies about myself and my life. I thought I would lose myself and create a better, 2.0 version of the girl who had graduate high school. What I didn't realize at the time was that it is impossible to find yourself but it is quite easy to lose yourself.
Most people who are lost are lost within themselves. They are lost to depression, drugs, alcohol, or some other disease that lives inside of them like a parasite. People wander around inside of their heads, second guessing themselves, doubting themselves, not loving themselves, not living up to their potential, just wallowing in a shadow of who they really could be. These people do not need to "find themselves" nor do they need someone to "save them" though they do need someone beside them as they rediscover who they are, as they reinvent themselves, recreate themselves. You can never go back to you who were before you stepped off the path, before you dropped in the abyss, but you can always always always begin again. And that's what I did. That's what I had to do. It was either that or die of alcoholism.
Once I gave up the booze, I thought I got my life together. I haven't lost sight of who I am but recently, I've been wondering if who I decided who I want to be is really who I should be. I choose to pursue a degree in teaching. At first I wanted to teach English, then History AND English, now just History. Now I am doubting that as well. I wonder if I chose to be a teacher or if I just picked it because that's what people told me I'd be good at and I just wanted to finish school. If I could, would I still be an actress? Or maybe a baker? A chef? Or an editor? Or could I still write that novel? Or a children's book? Or a child's psychologist?
I talked to my significant other about it and he commented, "I don't think you ever really know what you want to do until you start doing it." I love him to death but we are different people. I do not think he is a dreamer, an artist. I want to be passionate about my work, I want to wake up in the morning, most mornings at least, dying to go to work. I don't want work to be something I do for money, I want it to be something I do to change lives, to make me happy, a way of making a mark on this world.
I like to believe, to hope, that I am not being unrealistic or naive, that I am being optimistic and that one day I will look back and think, "Thank God I did not settle, thank God I chased after a dream I couldn't see but knew I had to reach." But will that happen? Or will I merely look back and think, "Shit I wasted a lot of time and money" ?
I want to believe I am not lost, not again, I want to believe instead that I am simply spinning in circles, a campus frantically trying to find its way North. In the meantime, I have no motivation, no drive, no passion to do anything academically and I wonder, am I depressed? am I starting to lose myself? am I being nibbled on by a parasite waiting to devour me yet again? Or am I just tired of having no desire, of being unsure of what I want? Regardless, I am scared, scared of myself, of the parasite I know is always lurking, and mostly, scared of time, for it never lasts.
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