college

college and what it all means

Last week, my father and I were driving down the road and suddenly, I thought I had figured everything out. I turned to him, and I said, “I think I’ve decided.”

His eyes were fixed on the road, but he glanced at me. “What’s that?”

“I think I’m going to stay here for two years and go to school at CBC.”

And at the time, it really did seem like the option I wanted to choose. At the time, it seemed like I had really figured everything out, at last. Like all of the years I spent agonizing over my choices and the decisions I needed to make and the plans I needed to formulate had finally come to an end, and I could wholeheartedly approach the future without the worries that had been haunting me since I entered high school.

And yet here I am, a week later, thinking over this so-called decision I’ve made, unsure if this is the future I want to approach. Unsure if there’s any possible future I’d entirely want to pursue one-hundred percent. And as I think about it, I really don’t think there is. And that scares me. That scares the thirteen year-old girl who wanted to be an astronaut. The fifteen year-old me who was determined to join the airforce to fly jets. The sixteen year-old girl who wanted to change the world, one environmental restoration project at a time.

It scares me. It scares all versions of me.

I don’t know if there will ever be a time in my life when all of these problems suddenly go away. Maybe that’s what life is: a constant struggle to figure everything you think you need to figure out. Maybe life would be a whole lot easier if everyone realized that you can’t figure everything out.

You simply can’t.