I often have feelings of inadequacy. I should have graduated college almost a year ago, but I have at least another year to go. I live with my parents. I do little else other than working, going to school, doing homework, and sleeping.
When I was 16, I thought 22 would be the ideal age. I would have graduated from college, and have a great job, and know exactly where my life was going. I was planning to be an awesome youth minister, to have a really cool boyfriend or fiance, and probably be living in Colorado. Now that I am 22, nothing could be further from the truth.
Today, I had to run to wal-mart for work. The cashier was one of my acquaintances from high school. We were never good friends, but we were in a lot of the same classes. She was (is) very smart, made excellent grades, and was generally the kind of person slated for a bright future.
We chatted while she was checking me out, and she’s working, getting her master’s degree because she can’t do anything with her bachelor’s degree, and generally in a pretty similar life place to me. She encouraged me to stay in my undergrad program as long as I can.
While we were talking, I realized that even though I often feel inadequate, I am totally unduly projecting the idea that I am not good enough onto myself. Almost no one with whom I graduated from high school actually has their whole life together, and further, the people with whom I started college aren’t faring much better out in the world. We’re all still drifting, trying to figure out where we fit, and who we are going to be. Everybody else is in almost exactly the same place that I am, and everybody probably feels the same strange mix of hope and frustration that I do.
I guess this is what 22 is supposed to feel like. Anticipation for the future, confusion about the present, a lack of knowledge about what will become of careers and relationships and just about everything else. Based on the mean, I still have 56 years, give or take, to live. (And considering I have great genes for longevity, probably more.) I’ve only been an adult for four years. I do not have to have everything figured out yet. And for that matter, I probably shouldn’t.
Often I have a desire to wrap up my longer blog posts in a tidy bow, and because I don’t really have one clear point here, I don’t have one singular thesis to wrap things up with. But I will say, at this moment, I’m glad to have a lot of change and growth and crazy new things ahead of me. Even if the very idea of not knowing what will come scares the living crap out of me.
"I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page concurrently."
- Donald Miller
