If I had to pick the most important thing that I’ve learned in high school, it’s this: Life will, most likely, never turn out the way you think it will.
And when I say that, I’m talking about all of the planning and predicting that’s happening in the heads of every underclassmen and junior that’s reading this right now. I completely understand the predicament you’re in, and I was, and still am, probably the biggest culprit of chronically planning my life out. From where I was going to college to where I was going to live after college and from where I was going to work to what kind of New York City apartment I wanted to get, I had my life planned out to the very last detail as a sophomore, junior, and first semester senior. I knew where I was headed, and I thought I had a set path in the right direction.
But life has a really funny way of messing up your plans, no matter how “prepared” you think you are. I didn’t get into the colleges that I planned on getting into. Needless to say, I cried for a good three hours and felt the fear of having my plan turned completely upside down. I realized how much I was banking onto this grand scheme for my life, and I seriously put all my chips into getting accepted that one college to kick start my “life” on the right foot. I felt not only my disappointment, but the disappointment of my parents and friends. I just kept thinking, this ISN’T supposed to happen to me! I HAD A PLAN. I HAD IT ALL FIGURED OUT. But, now what? Where’s my plan now? What do I do? I had absolutely no idea. The blank page of life was staring at me, and it shook me to my core.
But the great thing about blank pages is that there’s room for something new. There is room for change, there is room for shift, and there is room for new beginnings. Now I am committed to a college that I didn’t even really think twice about when I applied, I just applied so that I could have my “options open.” But I always knew that I wanted to live on the East Coast, and I had always wanted to work as a journalist in DC, so I’m now proudly going to George Washington University to hopefully be double majoring in Journalism and Political Science. Originally, I had planned to, yearned for, and dreamed about marching off to Annenberg School of Communication at USC or heading off to Northwestern’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism. I guess those schools, and that path, weren’t in fate’s cards for me. Usually, rejections are hard to talk about, but I wanted to share this with all of you so that you can learn a little something from me and my journey: Probably nothing in your life will turn out the way you think it will go, or how you plan it will unfold.
But even now, after this whole college deal threw me into a tailspin, I find myself wound up in planning for my life, yet again. I stay awake at night thinking about what I need to do to get my foot in the door of the most well-known network newsrooms in the country. I watch The Newsroom and I catch myself wishing I could be in MacKenzie McHale’s shoes, and I watch The West Wing and think about what it would be like to sit in the White House Briefing Room. And it’s really frightening to think that in my life, I may not be able to walk into the CNN building, or be in a Fox News control room, or feel that rush you get right before you go live on-air during primetime.
But despite my fears for post-college life, and my prior fears of getting selected into the college of my dreams, I learned that, all that planning? It’s kind of pointless. All that worrying? It’s just a massive waste of time and energy. It’s good to have a direction and have an awareness of your goals, but to let those goals make you scared and to let them cage you in is anything but good for your wellbeing. Life throws you massive curveballs, and being scared of them is not a good life to lead.
I guess what I’m trying to say throughout all of this is that, you can plan all you want, you can speculate and you can predict to your heart’s content, but you will never have full control of the future, no matter what you do and no matter how hard you work. All you can do now is hope, set up some goals for yourself, and trust that you have the skills and the savvy to take life by the horns and to take advantage of any opportunity that comes your way.
So take some advice from my main girl Elsa, and just let all those plans and expectations go. Just let it go. Trust yourself, because you can, and will, get it done when it needs to be done.