Why I can´t get off the bed and do what I’m supposed to be doing.
So, here’s the thing, I’m 22 years old, I’m living abroad and I’m studying journalism, so I’m supposed to be a responsible adult and take the rails of my life or at least that’s what my mum says. But there is a problem: I’m just 21 years old, I’m not an adult. My life is just starting. I shouldn’t have to worry about what I’m going to do the rest of my life rigth now, or should I?
I have two things in my mind right now, one of them is a list with a bunch of incomplete goals that I haven’t accomplished yet (because I’m 21…). The other one is a list of fears, a list of thing that would scare me to death if I do the things that I’m supposed to do. I have a couple problems with the first one, the biggest problem is that the whole list contradicts itself. The list is full of goals but not just mine, there is a mix between the ones that were imposed by my family and society, the things that I’m supposed to do. And there are the things that I would like to do. So yes, it might be confusing… at least for me.
Fist goal: “Graduate, find a job, grow up, be successful and all this crap”. Those are things that probably most of us have heard at least ones in our lives. And don’t get me wrong I do want success, I did get to choose what I wanted to study. And probably I do want to be a journalist. I’m not one of those cliches on movies that parents want to control my future and want me to take over the family business (sorry if you can relate) a have a pretty good family and they let me make my decisions but to a certain extent. They keep saying that I’m “an investment”, it means that if I don’t accomplish they would have lost their money… kinda. But I don’t want to wake up in ten years and find out that I missed the best years of my life sitting in front of a computer, writing stuff that I probably don’t give a fuck about. All this tipical millennials problems leads me to my second goal.
Second goal: I just want to travel, I want to get to know the wold from what I see with my own eyes. I don’t want to read it somewhere or hear it from someone else. I want to do it. I want to have the whole experience, I want to live on a continued adventure. I want to wake up and just say “ok I want to go skiing so tomorrow I’ll go to Switzerland” and after a month skiing and after I realized I’m terrible at it, say “I prefer to go surfing to Hawaii” and then “I want to go and claim a mountain in Chile” and so on. And just visit every city in this world, learn about every culture and get to know all different kind of people. At least ‘till I get tired of not having any kind of stability in my life…
That’s all. I know is not much, normally people have more on their bucket list than two simple things for their future, but I don’t want to keep planning things especially when I change my mind every five seconds. So this is all, I have two goals in my life and both of them leads me to fear and deception.
What do I fear? I fear that if I graduate and get a stable job at 25 that will be it. I might start a family, have children and get a husband and then get divorced or not. I don’t want to start talking about my love life right now, so I won’t. But that really will be it, I would like to say that with my degree I will be a star journalist and I’ll work for CCN or BBC and I will travel the world, but is not realistic. Is not a goal, is a dream. So yes I don’t want this 8 to 5 life because it sounds so boring.
What else do I fear? If I just quit everything I say fuck off I’m going to travel the world, working as a waitress the rest of my life. THAT WILL BE IT. Fine I traveled, enjoyed. But after 10 or 15 years I will be alone. All of my friends will have kids and even grandkids, my family will be so disappointed that they will stop talking to me and my actual boyfriend will dump me because I’m traveling all the time. So I end up alone, friendless, loveless, jobless even homeless. Because if I choose this life I wont have a home. And getting even more realistic, we live in a very competitive era were people graduate at 22 and become entrepreneurs at 25. I will be an unemployed 30 years old that spent the last ten years traveling, so my opportunities of finding a job as a journalist are even lower.
This is my dilemma. Whatever I choose to do leads me to nothing. Should I go crazy and after ten years end up alone or do what I supposed to do and end up empty? Currently, I’m doing none of them, because I think that all of this is pointless. I am sleeping ‘till 2 pm and watching Netflix all day because at this point everything is so uncertain that is not enough motivation to make me get off the bed and do what I’m supposed to be doing.