Hey To All The New Decades

I’m 24 years old and I have no idea what it is that I’m doing with my life. I’m three quarters through a degree I’m not sure I fully like but will go through anyway and lastly, I’m waiting for a miracle.

Sounds familiar

“I give up. I don’t care about this anymore. I’m going think my life tomorrow and go back to reading the new set of books”, said the smartest person I knew and also the most level headed if I may. There’s a point in your life where you’d say I’m going through an existential crisis but when your every day seems like a crisis, existential stops being a special word.

I wished I had a better answer for him. I wish I could say you’ll know when you know, but time was slipping away like sand, and we were being sucked into a fiscal vacuum, where we only lost money on an education we weren’t sure we wanted anymore. I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I’ve known. I never said those words out loud till I was 16 only to be told, these are not things that people who were intellectually gifted enough to do advanced math and write code say. I went with it and to this day I wonder if it was the right choice.

A year into a cliched engineering degree, I explored myself in the mountains for the first time. I rebelled, yelled and stayed stubborn till I had a visa in my hand to an unknown land that I believed would set me free. That was my favorite summer with a lifetime of love, laughter and tears rolled into 42 exquisite days. I loved that bubble, the high that fantasy gave me until I lost what it means to be grounded. I was never the same.

Another year in, I discover what it means to be a leader and despite not being a people person, people are what I do best and this had nothing to do with my degree and I was inevitably falling in love with just that. The little glimpses into alternate futures that my experience in working in a social sector was preparing me for life but also making me question every move, every career counseling session that I would eventually go through, but I still had no idea, what is the one thing that I truly wanted.

So here I am, still waiting for the miracle, the epiphany that would make me change the trajectory of my life entirely or to see if I was practical enough to stick to what I had started because there was nothing I hated more than being a quitter. But where do you draw the line between what makes your heart skip a beat and what will allow you to survive? When does ambition start being a dirty word until compromise be what we belittle instead?

People in this country do not have the luxury to just stay at home for six months after a degree to take the time to just analyze and reflect on what it is that they will do for the rest of their life. What they’d commit to, and let it consume them every morning.

I honestly stopped looking at the little things while the standard interview question ran through my head, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” and while there is no definitive answer, here’s what I do know I want, my little list that one must flow

1. Live a life of honesty.
2. Treat everyone right.
3. Learn to accept happiness and hold it
4. Notice tiny quirks in the people you love
5. Get healthier, not skinnier
6. Learn, stop trying to word vomit through examinations
7. Read every day if you still love writing
8. Don’t give up
9. Take risks
10. Be more accepting.
11. Success means nothing if you have no one to share it with
12. Someday, remember who you were before the world told you who you should be
13. Your miracle has always existed, it’s you.