Life is like a speeding train. For the longest time, I believed I was in its path, blindfolded. As I heard it coming closer, the pressure to choose where to go was crippling. No direction felt safe. What if one day, life caught up and crashed into everything I had built because I chose wrong? Was it better to not choose at all?
In school, I would make choices and defend my decisions with every fiber. They could not be wrong; I would not let them be. My plans had to work. As I realized how much I had underestimated adulthood, the blindfold felt so much thicker. How could I make plans with incomplete riddles? Everything felt like it was going to be a gamble. How much was I willing to gamble?
Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist, introduced me to a perspective that I hadn't considered before. The concept of Identity Capital. The idea that there was no way to understand the future of our careers. All we could do was make sure we invested in ourselves to grow in the general direction of the career that felt right. Armed with half knowledge and fragile hopes, the question became, where can we go? That question made me realize the power of being a 20 something. The answer was anywhere.
When you move in a direction, any direction, you gain a better understanding of your options. It is worse to not choose at all and even worse to ignore the knowledge that your previous choices helped you gain. You might have to invest years of your life in figuring out that a path isn’t for you. It doesn’t mean you failed. It doesn’t mean you wasted your life. You chose to live without the regret of never taking that path, and you gained knowledge, connections, friends, and a better understanding of yourself along the way. Now is our time to explore and explore in a way that counts.
Exploration that doesn’t count is, after all, only procrastination. There’s nothing wrong with it. However, taking out six months to travel the country because life is overwhelming will hardly help life be less overwhelming. Taking even a two-month-long internship in the industry of your dreams would help. We don’t have to commit for life to every choice we make. Especially at our age, when our job is not to know but to find out.
What do you think happens when we spend this time making choices that we already know the results to? Dating the person that we will break up with or accepting a job that we know we'll hate. After all, if we never let ourselves try what we think we desire, we can live our whole life in the comfort of that regret. “If only I had become a chef instead, my life would be better.”
It's terrifying to explore that desire. What if we dislike that career as much as we dislike the one we're in? We’ll have to choose again. And so, we never take that internship; we never pick up that weekend job, we never truly make ourselves vulnerable to failure. It would disrupt the comfort of the story that we tell ourselves.
I refuse to waste my 20s failing on purpose. I really hope I work passionately, love completely, and dare to fall on my face despite doing both. I know it’s scary to believe that we can try our very best and still fail, but it’s true and it will happen. I believe failure is inevitable and all we can do is postpone it. I want 30 something Charizma to be able to look back at 20 something Charizma and thank her for failing now.
Many life-defining decisions are headed our way, and we can either stand on the tracks paralyzed or take the pressure away and move. Let’s face it, they’ll all feel like the wrong choice at the moment, and ten years down the line, when we’ve overcome the obstacles our decisions made us face, we’ll realize that it was the right one.
Until next time,
Charizma.
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