I am so excited to announce that I don’t know what I am going to do with my life.
A month ago, I had a plan. I was going to graduate a year late. The last three years of my college would be paid for by agreeing to teach a language in Oklahoma for four years. I would live in Oklahoma, teaching French or Latin and wear cute teacher clothes. While I was teaching, I was going to get my master’s. After my mandatory of four years to uphold my end of the student loan, I would have a few options. Either during the past four years I would have met someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and we would then perhaps stay in Oklahoma. Or I would still just be one person and I could move anywhere to do something in education. Or just stay in Oklahoma by myself.
In any case, the next six years of my life were laid out before. Fixed and unchangeable.
This all changed a few weeks ago. It doesn’t matter how I came to this decision, but suddenly everything was so clear: the hope of freedom was more important to me than financial security. Before, I settled for this plan to stay in education, make a small teacher’s salary, but have job security for the rest of my life. I would be surrounded by my family and the same horizon I’d seen for the majority of my life. My other option was to abandon all of that and face a never ending abyss of options.
When I was first going into college, I lamented the view. This limitless future was too daunting to understand. I was so afraid of taking a wrong step and ending up on the wrong path. It felt like once I began walking, there was no going back. But I have learned that I am privileged. Being raised in middle class America with friends and family who love me so much, I will never drown. I can swim as far out to sea as I would like, and someone will always throw me a life-preserver. If that is true, why would I only splash around on the coast? There is so much out there to explore and I can see as much of it as I want.
So now, I am going to graduate having studying what I truly care about: double major in Letters and French, minor in Latin. I am going to hopefully be able to do the Teaching Assistant Program in France after I graduate. If I don’t get into the program, who knows? After TAPIF, who knows? But this feeling of not knowing makes me so happy. I am excited to see what will happen. While not everything that happens to me will be good or fun, I have faith that it will all work out for the best.
When I was going into college, I wrote this:
"I feel like, my whole life, I was on a path. Set on that path by my parents, God, fate, or whatever, but on a path. At certain points I came to a fork in the road. Maybe I’d be worried about which way to go, but I always knew that it would be all right. I would choose right or left and move onto that road. Well after college, life is more like a huge forest. All you can see is trees, you can hardly find the sky. No going back, you have to navigate the forest. Of course there are paths once you make it out of the forest, but you have to find them."
Now I am so excited to be in this forest. I want to look at all the trees. I want to climb them and find out which one is the strongest. Which one turns the most beautiful colors in the fall? I’ll end up outside of the forest, but I’m enjoying the wonder this mysterious place.
I can’t point to one event that makes me feel so at peace with not knowing. Maybe it’s self-growth. Maybe it’s witnessing my family fall apart and yet remain resilient. It could be God or just being 21 instead of 19. I don’t really care what it is, but I am thankful for whatever it is that has changed.
It’s reminds me of what Belle says in the musical Beauty and the Beast. “No change of heart, a change in me.”
