Are you in your mid to late 20’s and still completely baffled as to what you want to do with your life? If you are… it’s okay! I’m here to convince you that there really is no right timeline for your life.
I’m the absolute queen of hesitation, contemplation & reluctancy. I do this thing where I set my sights on something, put my all into it and then one day decide it’s not where I want to be or what I want. And that’s nothing new; I’ve done it since I was a kid. When my teachers would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d give a million different answers ranging from a doctor or lawyer to a zookeeper or an interior designer.
Now, here we are 20 some years later & I’d still give you the same damn answers.
I spent 6 full years of my life striving for a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree and now I find myself $50,000 in student loan debt and not even utilizing those expensive pieces of paper. Talk about feeling like a failure.
So why did I do it then? Because I was always told that it was what I’m supposed to do.
Society has this mean way of supplying us with this specific timeline for our lives. You graduate high school, go to college where you meet your future spouse, settle down with a good career and start a family, all before you’re 30. I don’t know many people in the generation before me that didn’t live up to that traditional timeline.
Well, I’m here to say SCREW THE TIMELINE.
We put so much pressure on ourselves to follow suit with everyone else around us and trust me, I’m no exception to that. I’ve struggled so much in trying to find my path. Up until I met my husband and he whisked me away to live in Europe for a few years, I didn’t even have anything in my life that inspired or motivated me.
It took me traveling all around Europe to finally find something that gives me that urge to do things for myself.
So, one day I decided to write. I compiled a bunch of pictures from some trips in Europe and I wrote about it. After spending hours on it, I realized that this warm fuzzy feeling I had was called inspiration. For once in my 25 years I was inspired by traveling & motivated to write about it. And the best part? It’s now been multiple months since that day and I still haven’t given up on it; something I’ve never been able to say about things I’ve taken on in the past.
But everyone in the world would give up their 9 to 5 for a life like that, right? To travel with their best friend, take lots of pretty pictures & write about the amazing time that they had. That sort of life is usually something that we just think about and an idea that we place into our dream bank for later.
It’s okay to be envious of what other’s have. That envy & jealousy transforms into a desire that lights that fire under your butt to get going. It helps you realize what you want out of life and what you don’t want (which I can relate to).
I see 30 year olds still struggling to find themselves and their path and while they may think that they’re a failure, I think they’re an inspiration because it shows me that I don’t have to have my life figured out right away either.
If you don’t have a degree, a career, a spouse, a house and a baby by the time you’re 30, THAT’S OKAY.
Finding yourself and your path in life takes time. It won’t happen overnight and it sure as hell won’t plop itself onto your doorstep. You have to find that drive and hunger within yourself and then, maybe, we can figure our stuff out & start heading in the direction that we want to be in.
