As someone born at the dawn of the new millennium, I am often overwhelmed with the abundance of options and pathways I have available to me. Of course, being born into a middle-class family that has always offered their support has only cemented, if not increased these options. And I am, of course, eternally grateful for that privilege.
From a young age, I, as well as many other
children like me, was often told that I could be anything or anyone that I
wanted to be (although my parents always made a point to frequently mention dentistry).
And whilst at the time, we would nod our heads, murmur “yes mum”, and hastily
get back to finishing our Shitzu’s agility trial on Nintendogs in peace, for
those of us who are driven, self-motivated, and have the necessary tools
required to accomplish our goal of choice, they’re right. We can, in the most
literal sense of the phrase, do and be whatever we want. The sky is the limit, the world is our oyster, and whatever other proverbial phrase you can think of.
They’re all true.
Now, don't let my tone later fool you; I love having all of these options available to me. In fact, it’s what I love most about
life. These options are what took me from being balls-deep in a serious depression in 2018 to standing on a boat in a big, plastic raincoat in the
middle of Niagara Falls crying tears of gratitude
exactly 12 months later. It’s these options, and the subsequent decisions we
make from them, that have the power to get us to exactly where we want to be. However,
for the chronically indecisive Pisces-Gemini like myself, this abundance of
options can also be the catalyst of many meltdowns and existential crises.
In my final year of high school, I was overwhelmed with the number of potential
career paths, and as I was standing in a sea of soon-to-be nurses, teachers,
and lawyers, I quickly realised that I was one of the few students in my cohort with absolutely no clear career direction. My final course preference list looked more like a
randomised selection of jobs someone picked out from a hat than anything else.
Due to my self-proclaimed slightly above-average gift in creative writing, I
hesitantly chose a journalism degree, only to realise a month later, “Why the
fuck would I want a journalism degree?” and eventually deferred. And truthfully, it took me
until only recently to realise that the course that I eventually chose is what I actually want to do (clinical psychologist, if you're wondering). Hell, even now I sometimes wonder if
maybe I’d prefer teaching, marketing, public relations, or being a contestant on
a reality TV show.
Despite all of this confusion, I have, in my wise age
of 20 years and 8 months, appeared to have stumbled upon the solution. And that is to keep moving. Keep
working on being the best version of yourself. Jump around from idea to idea if
you must, but whatever you do, keep moving. It doesn’t matter if your life
isn’t perfectly curated by the age of 23 (a lesson I need to remind myself of
from time to time), and it doesn't matter if you feel unsure about what direction you're going in. So long as you’re moving, you will always be one step ahead
of where you were, and one step closer to whatever option or goal you will
eventually choose to chase. And then when you’re on a break from grinding, you
can blame your star sign, your upbringing, or Mercury being in retrograde
for your indecisive nature like I do.
- Loz
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