Some people will
not understand your journey. And no amount of words strung together in a
perfectly explainable fashion will lead them to comprehend who you are and how
life has brought you to this point. That’s okay. But since I am a person who seeks
approval from others, I never find it easy to face this fact. However, I have
learned that striving for constant approval and satisfaction from those around
us is like trying to run on a treadmill in snow boots. It might be all right
for a while, but it quickly becomes frustrating, uncomfortable, and just plain difficult.
My life has never
fit into any particular mold. Experiences and situations have taken me in different and unexpected directions. I
didn’t grow up in one town and date a guy on the
football team and graduate high school to go directly to college and major in psychology and
drive a cute little 4 door sedan and work as a barista on the weekends and marry my college boyfriend and buy a house down the
street from my parents and have 2.1 children and--you get the picture.
I was thinking
about this the other day. I have a very strong memory from the summer after I
graduated high school. All of my friends were heading off to college, to study
medicine, or business, or education. I was 17 and literally had no clue what I
wanted to do with my life. All I knew was that the happiest I’d ever been was
when I was in Africa the year before. I didn't want to spend $70k to study something I wasn't even sure I was interested in, I wanted to go back to Africa. So I did.
It was nearing the
end of the summer and my friends and I were all staying over at someone’s
house. My friends’ mom had come in and started asking about my future plans. I
told her I wasn’t going to college because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I
saw a confused look cross her face, and she said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong
with that.”
For some reason,
her comment irked me for many months, and possibly years, after that
brief interaction. The fact that she said “there’s nothing wrong with that”
lead me to believe just the opposite. That yes, there was something very wrong
with that. I know she didn’t mean any harm, and it only affected me so deeply
because of my own self doubts. What was the matter with me that I couldn’t
make a decision about my future when everyone else seemed to have it all mapped
out?
I hate that our
American society has put such pressure on the younger generation to make such
huge—and expensive!—decisions that will effect their entire futures. Don’t get
me wrong; I’m a huge believer in education. I love to learn and discover new
things, whether that’s from sitting in a classroom or simply talking to someone
with more wisdom and experience than me. Education opens new doors and can lead
us on great adventures, but so can experience.
If I had listened to others opinions about some of my life choices I would have
missed out on the greatest things. It scares me to think of where I might be if I had left for college in the fall of 2008. It's a terrifying thought, really. But that's not to say that is or was the wrong decision for everyone, it was just the wrong one for me. Some people's roads will take them to college to major in psychology and drive the 4 door sedan and work as a barista on the weekends and "there's nothing wrong with that."
But really, there isn't! We need to stop the relentless comparing and judging and labelling of our lives over the next persons. Everyone’s journey is different. That’s
called being a human. Deep down, we all
know the road we are meant to take. Don’t veer off into another lane based on
fear of others’ opinions. While it can be scary to go against the grain I’d
imagine it’s much scarier to do what everyone else is doing with absolutely no
reason why. And when I know in my heart of hearts that I’m on the right road,
the desire to prove it seems to vanish.
Now, nearly 8 years
later, I am planning to go back to college (yay!). So I have been giving
education a lot of thought. For my application essay I was asked to answer the
following writing prompt: If you have any
personal or additional information that you would like the admissions committee
to consider in its holistic review of your application, please share that
information below.(Maximum 4,000 characters) Talk about open ended, right?
After mulling it over for a while I realized that in these 4,000
characters I had to effectively communicate why 25-year-old Lindsey is finally
doing what everyone thought 17-year-old Lindsey should’ve done back in
2008. And the bigger thing: why I’m glad
to be doing it now rather than back then. I wrote that essay, and I answered
those questions. And I found my only difficulty in doing so was trying to keep it
under the 4,000-character limit.
It seems that the admissions committee agreed with my sentiments, because I got in!