For the first time in my life, I am approaching a season of not knowing my next steps. For the past 18 or so years, my life has been planned around my education. Even when I didn’t know where I was going to attend college, I knew that nonetheless, I was going to attend college. Education has always shaped what my life looks like. But in the first week of June, my walk across the commencement stage will mark the end of education being the baseline for my future. Granted, one day I may go back to school for a master’s degree, but that isn’t my immediate plan. Instead, I am faced with the exciting and paralysing expansiveness of my future. An expansive and open-ended future feels like two sides of a coin. One side elicits incredible wonder and excitement as it feels like the world is limitless. It feels like I could do anything and everything. The other side brings dread and paralysing fear. I don’t have a clear direction for my life, no one is telling me what to do and I can’t measure my life through A’s and B’s anymore.
One of the biggest struggles I have felt as I experience these two sides of the coin, are the shoulds. These are the things that I feel pressured to do while I can by friends, family, myself, and culture as a whole. I am only this young once in my life. I should take advantage of not being tied down to a place or a person. I should travel the world while I can. I should live in a big city and live the rom-com life while I can. I should get random jobs that make for great stories while I can. I should date a bunch of people before settling down while I can. The list of shoulds goes on. My battle has been sifting through which shoulds feel meaningful to me.
The past few months, I have been trying to ground myself in the sense of being reminded of who I am and what I love; what I find meaning in. Like a lot of people, I love to travel. Since graduating high school, I’ve lived in 3 states and spent time for extended periods of time in 3 countries. I realised I had attached part of my identity to this nomadic style of living, never staying in one place too long. I don’t have any regrets about my choices in where I have spent my life the past four years, but this has also prevented me from putting down roots. I have made connections and friendships that I believe will last a lifetime, but I struggle to find where to call home and where to return to. In assessing my options and possibilities for life after graduation, one of the biggest factors has been where am I going to go? Should I stay in Seattle? Should I go back to my family in Michigan? Maybe I should go back to Australia where I spent a gap year and all my friends are? For a while, it felt like making a decision would seal my fate forever, so I just avoided making a decision. It felt easier to say “oh I’ll figure it out later” than to make any commitment. But as I began to reevaluate what I wanted in my life post-grad, I knew that I wanted to start putting down roots. I realised I wanted to be closer to my family and being on the other side of the country was taking a toll on me. But then my mind immediately floods with “but I should be living my young and free life in my twenties in a big city while I can!”, whatever that even means. I love living in Seattle right now, but I know that ultimately it isn’t where I want to be. I may not be fulfilling the shoulds that culture feeds me, but I will be pursuing what is meaningful to me.
I also realised that making a decision does not seal my fate for the rest of my life. I am going back to Michigan for the time being, but I can always move again. Instead of limiting my options, I found that making a decision actually opened more options as it gave me clearer direction as to where my life could go. Maybe I will find a job that I love and everything falls into place while I am in Michigan. Or maybe an opportunity will come up somewhere else and I will leave, but at least I have a path to follow. I still haven’t conquered the pressure of the shoulds that rattle in my brain. Instead, I am consistently working through what is meaningful to me and how to best live that out.