#18 Realized

When I started the whole college process, saying I was stressed was the understatement of the century. I'd always seen past seniors and wondered why they were literally going crazy over it. All applying to college is is filling out some electronic forms, writing an essay, and pressing submit, right? Wrong. It's endless stress. It's filling out electronic forms, writing tons of essays trying to figure out which one is going to make you look the best to an admissions board, filling out scholarship and financial aid information so that your parents don't freak out about money, taking standardized tests, finding people to write you a letter of recommendation, and about a million other things. And then pressing submit - which was probably the hardest part for me. Oh and did I mention that you have to do all this and maintain your life outside of college applications? Yeah. And then, even when you submit your applications, the stress continues. You're playing The Waiting Game - arguably the most daunting game ever. And then when you get your acceptances or rejections, the stress continues. Where do you go? What do you do next? Seeing a trend here? Yeah, stress. This whole college application process is all about doing something bigger with your life. About figuring out what you're going to do with the rest of your life. Trying to decide your path at 17 or 18 is one of the toughest things in the world. What I should've realized earlier is that you don't need to know exactly what you're going to do when you're applying for college. I should've realized that it's really rare to know what you want to do with your life when you're 17. The most I think about is what I have due for homework the next day or what my mom is making for dinner. Some people have their entire lives mapped out, career included, but that certainly is not the norm. Knowing exactly what you want to do is not normal. And not "not normal" in a bad way, but "not normal" in the sense that it's extremely rare. I've realized that it's okay not to know. I'm okay with not knowing what job I'm going to have when I'm an adult. I know what I like and I know what I'll study in college, but I don't know how I'll parlay that into a career. I think part of what makes the pre-college process so stressful is that we're expected to decide our paths. People expect that we'll know exactly what to do, but the reality is that we don't. The idea of trying to decide the rest of my life right now is the scariest thing in the world. Applying to college is not the last step in deciding your future. It is merely the beginning of your discovery of yourself. Lewis Carroll once said, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there," so remember that when you're freaking out about not knowing exactly what you're going to do in college.

This post is dedicated to my lovely friend, Elizabeth, who is one of those rare people who knows what she wants to do and where she wants to do it. I aspire to be like you in more ways than one. Happy birthday love.