This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Montclair chapter.
From the moment we graduate high school, we are expected to know what we want to do in life. We have to pick the college we wish to attend, pick our major, and essentially, decide the path we want to follow then and there. Once we get to college, everything is geared towards the career we will have after we get our degree. We take classes that will give us skills to impress future employers and we apply for internships to get a head start in our job search. We are expected to have all the answers. We are expected to know what we want to do with the rest of our lives. There has to be a plan. But here’s a little secret that I want to tell you, a secret that maybe no one has shared with you yet: it’s okay to not have a plan for the rest of your life.
Here’s the thing. We are barely adults when we are sat down and told to pick a life path that we think we will enjoy for the rest of our lives. At barely 18 years old, when high school comes to an end, we are just beginning the search for who we truly are. College is the time where we start to really find ourselves and are finally free to do what we want. It is a time for self-discovery that is ruined by people telling us we have to get our lives together, but what if we just stopped for a moment and looked around, we find that life is so much more than planning for our future. We are just beginning our adult lives, and while it is good to plan for the future, not knowing what that future holds is not the end of the world. There is often this societal pressure to know what we want to do with our lives, and when you don’t know what you want to do, you are seen as falling behind, some even going as far as to label this as failure. But we are so far from that.
Every day, I change my mind on what I want to do. I am a completely different person than I was a year ago, even a few months ago, with different goals and plans for the future. As I grow, I have come to find that the things that I thought I wanted to do, were actually things that didn’t fit who I was. I’ve changed my mind on what I want to do with school so many times that it’s almost too many to count. I went from being the girl who thought she wanted to move across the country to be a creative writer, to the girl who stayed in her state, joined a sorority, and discovered her love for journalism. It was all in the course of the last year that I did a 180 on how I feel my life should go, and what I want out of my life is still changing which is absolutely fine.
To those, like me, who find themselves still unsure with what they want to do with their lives, I want you to know that it is okay. It is okay to still be finding yourself and not know where your life will go next. We are people who deserve to take life one day at a time and we will all find our way. While others around us may seem like they have it all together, we shouldn’t look at them and think that our lives are a mess. We are still young adults who are finding ourselves in life and that is exactly where we should be.