Thinking back at how I expected my life to be by the time I reached my 20s, well it was not this. I expected I would have graduated from an amazing university with honors and gotten a degree in something that I love, I would have written my first book and maybe even had it published, I would be financially independent and may have even gotten married to the love of my life. Being a teenager, 23 just seems so far away and so grown up. You expect that everything in life will have fallen into place by then and you will have everything figured out. Reality is far from that and for good reason. When at 18 I was planning my bright-looking future I picked a major that, though I stuck with for almost three years, I realized I hated. I love to educate myself (matter of fact I do educate myself every single day) but I refuse to study something that utterly bores me and that I have no intention of working with just to have a piece of paper to shove in someone's face. Furthermore, I knew in my heart that there was no school that could teach me what I already was sure I wanted to do, so I decided to drop out of University and proceed to actively follow my dream by getting writing jobs(which hasn't been easy) and by taking time to actually write. I never put school out of the question I was just only willing to study something that I really love and until I found that it would just have to wait.
I am now not so suddenly but definitely abruptly faced with the question, not so much posed to me as a question but rather as a threat, of what I want to do with my life. My options as posed by my father are these: go back to school or be cut off and left to fend for myself, in order to realize that I must go back to school. I think the phrase we are looking for is emotional blackmail. Because, while I completely agree with the fact that I have to think about my future and what I want to do with that future and with the fact that I should find the way to support myself, I feel that this is not the question my dad is posing. In his eyes I am meant to go back to school in either option whether that is by choice or by facing the hardships of the real-world and changing my mind about it and going back to school. I feel like I will not be supported in either situation but rather I am expected to fail for even trying to make it without a college degree. I am automatically put into a category of "the one without a college degree" when I am so much more than that. University degrees are for some people but not for all. Maybe they are for me too but not until and if I find what it is I would want to do with that said degree.
Forgetting the words of my father, I am posing the question of what I want to do with my life to myself, whilst having the knowledge that I have already accomplished many things and have a lot to be proud of. For I don't feel that the time I have spent has been a waste rather quite an experience that has helped me to know myself better and in that be a better writer. Because I always knew I wanted to be a writer and if I can put pen to paper and finger to keyboard and produce something worthwhile than damn it I am.
I have worked in jobs I loved and some I hated and I'd do it again, and if paying the bills means getting a job I hate then I'll do that too (maybe it'll even give me something more to write about). And if a degree is what I want to get then that's what I'll do. Though I've been dreading myself and my impossible thoughts and agony and stress methinks maybe this is not such a bad thing. I'm choosing to focus on the positive and to commit myself to committing, to really apply myself and to follow my dreams. Whatever I decide in the process of fulfilling those dreams, I won't do it out of fear or because someone said so, but because it helps me better myself, for myself and gets me one step closer to the end of my personal rainbow.
Like my mum said "where there's a will, there's a way"
oouaou uperoxoooooooooooo
ReplyDelete