excerpts

3.0

When someone asks me, what do you want to be, I freeze up.

It's a terrifying question.

The answer: I don't know.

I have absolutely no clue and that terrifies me. My life has always been planned out systematically and logically from my classes to my extracurriculars.

Contradictorily, I was always more of a free spirit. I never quite fit into the mainstream, preferring unheard of artists to pop stars. I only pursued things I was interested in. I never did things for the sake of doing them. I wanted to be invested. That's how I came about a few of my many passions, writing, journalism, photography, and running.

Although I love and am thoroughly interested in each of these things, I could never pursue it as a career. These will always be side things.

I just haven't found my fit. Within a large puzzle, I haven't found the piece for my career yet, and I think that fine for now.

But at times I feel sheer terror thinking about the future, for example, when someone asks me what I want to be.

I'm not trying to brag, but I'm smart, not just on the scale of school grades. It's the way I can come up with ideas nobody else does. I think on different levels than other people. I see the world in so many different ways. Students and teachers in my classes will often turn to me and ask the shock inducing question, what do you want to be?

They gaze at me, quietly anticipating an answer, perhaps something great like "doctor" "lawyer" "scientist" "CEO".

I shake myself out of my anxiety induced stupor and sigh, I don't know.

They go, hmm, and give me a smile. Sometimes they'll say, it's okay, you'll figure it out, or I think you'd be good doing anything, or I thought you wanted to be "...".

But alas, that's the catch. I'm terribly indecisive. I don't have a favorite movie, color, food, moment in life. I just don't know. There are so many. What if I choose wrong? What if I dedicate myself into something that turns out to be a waste of time?

That's why I'm so scared of the future. I don't know what will come. Outside of school, nothing is really sure. I'll be on my own, even more alone than I usually am in this world. And I'll have to depend on myself more than ever.

I don't doubt that I can hold my own in this world, but I don't know what I'll make out of myself.

I like to think of myself as a box of sculpting clay.

Sometimes I'll open that box, trying different shapes, seeing where I fit, but I'll never really click with anything so I return to a lump of molded clay.

As much as I want to know what to do with my life, I won't follow a cookie cutter career. Doing what's safe and conforming to society.

Conformity is complacency!

I am independent. I can think for myself. I don't want to be complacent, simply okay with all the things happening, not having a say in what goes.

But being free comes with a price: not knowing. Unsurely going about life and crossing your fingers along the way, hoping that something goos comes out of the crazy journey.

So yes, I am terrified of the future and of that question, but at the end of the day I manage to settle my mind with the simple though that everything will soon fall into place. I just need to go where life takes me. Put up sails sometimes instead of trying to steer my own way.

Who knows where I could go, what I could do, who I could be?

That's the beauty of unsculpted clay. It can become absolutely anything.