“The Road Not Taken”: Notes on Changing Paths

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And…”

Wait, which one am I supposed to take? 

My personal statement for my college applications was about Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” One of my favorite pieces of writing, I connected this poem to my belief in the beauty of finding your path, staying curious, and enjoying the process of growing and evolving into the person you are becoming.  

When I was writing about Frost’s poem, I was imagining the version of my life that I had always seen laid out ahead of me: I would study English in college, write in my free time and get some of that writing published, work in the publishing industry as an editor, and then – eventually – write my own best selling novel. To me, this was a surefire plan, one that I held near and dear to my heart anytime someone would ask the age-old question of “what do you want to do with your life?” 

Despite its somewhat fantastical nature, I was confident in this plan. Sure, there were hesitations from my family and friends, particularly regarding the looming question of financial stability and overall job opportunity in a career field like writing and publishing. I saw these concerns – and I certainly shared them – but they didn’t necessarily impact my desire to pursue the career path I had always dreamt of. 

That is, until now. 

Before I get too carried away, I have to make one thing clear: the hesitations that I began having around my supposed career path did, admittedly, have to do with the competitive nature of the publishing industry, the characteristically low pay, and the lack of feasible job opportunities – all things that I learned about after attending Info Sessions hosted by some of the top publishing companies in the industry. 

With that said, this is not the only reason that, for better or for worse, my path has begun to diverge. In truth, the more I learned about the publishing industry, the more I hesitated as to whether or not it was something I really wanted to do. I love reading, and I love writing, but the more I learned from professionals in the industry, the more I learned that there is so much more to publishing than I thought. That might sound silly, but seeing how big of a role marketing, publicity, content creation, and media engagement play in the increasingly digitally-charged book industry was startling to me, so much so that I started reevaluating my interests. Though I love the idea of working with books and helping publish the next so-called Great American Novel, the path laid out before me started taking on a new shape, and I began to question – once again – what it truly was that I wanted to do with my life. 

At around the same time, I was able to attend an incredible lecture by activist Silky Shah, the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network (DWN). DWN is a coalition of different organizations and advocacy groups that seek to abolish immigrant detention in the United States, ultimately reimagining what our immigration process looks like and how it operates in the context of greater social structures like racism, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination. As someone who has always been very invested in conversations around immigration, this lecture – to put it lightly – changed my life. 

After listening to Shah speak, I felt called to action, rethinking what my path could look like if I wanted to center the activism that I am so passionate about as a part of my career and life aspirations. For the first time in a long time, I felt eager to carve out a new path for myself, to look beyond the clear-cut future I had always imagined. I felt inspired to think beyond certain limitations I had, unknowingly, bound myself to, looking instead for other paths that I could travel down. 

That all being said, let’s return to Frost’s poem, which has again served as a guiding light during this uncertain time of my life. In thinking about going down a different career path, or even simply not knowing exactly what path I want to go down, I was reminded of the last stanza of “The Road Not Taken,” which reads:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.” 

It is not easy to diverge from the path I had always planned on going down, especially when I have so many of the same passions as I did when I was first writing my college personal statement. I often wonder what I will think in hindsight, if the original path I had planned will one day be “The Road Not Taken” that I regret missing out on. Grappling with this uncertainty has been frightening, especially after being so certain about what I wanted to do for so long. What, I wonder, will “all the difference” be in the end? 

As challenging as these questions are, I have been learning to embrace the uncertainty, to embrace the waiting, and to embrace the process of learning more. In doing so, I have not only learned more about what I might want to do with my life (as they say), but also about who I want to be as a person. So, even though changing paths is incredibly scary – and even though there is, sometimes, a certain guilt about travelling down a different road – I know that, one way or another, it will all work out in the end. 

I know I will choose the correct path for myself, simply because the path will become correct the very moment I choose it. 

• #career
• #change
• #poem
• college
• mental health