Blogger’s recommendation: Play the above audio, Successful by Ariana Grande in the background.
I make lists in my head of all the things I need to do and all the things I never did. I get eager and want to do too much and end up not doing anything at all. I plan for the future so I can escape the present and I live in the present fearing the hereafter.
When I was younger, I used to get so excited thinking about all the things I would be able to do when I grow up. Don’t worry, I am not going to get all sappy about growing up and talk about how we will all become grandmas and grandpas with scolding back pain and an obsession with overfeeding our grandchildren. However, growing up has made me realize how weird time works. I am almost twenty and for some reason, it feels like it took forty years to get her, yet in retrospect, it seems like it flew by. Looking at the years to come, I can’t help but worry about how fast time might go by. I think it’s funny how none of us are really adults but at the same time, we are. Here we are trying to get jobs, doing extracurricular activities to put on our CVs, moving countries and paying bills.
The funny thing about adulthood is that there is no real transition. All of a sudden, we are expected to know how to behave and how to act and are entrusted to make decisions regarding the rest of our lives. Sometimes that can get really stressful and although I am a big believer in the idea that a diploma does not decide your future, I still want to do well and get myself one. The older you get the more performance-oriented life gets. If you want a good job, you need experience and to have the experience you need to take the right courses and the right internship, oh yeah let’s not forget about all the useful skills you need that nobody will teach you. While this isn’t completely false, it’s rather superficial.
Growing up is the sudden switch between doing what you want to and doing what you have to. Putting pressure on ourselves to achieve all our goals and feeling disappointed when things don’t go the way we planned. It has become so normalized to strive for nothing other than perfection because results are all that are valued. Maybe it is time to normalize just doing your best. I’m a firm believer in the idea that if you do what you enjoy and put in the effort, you will be alright. Success reflects itself in subjectivity; there is not one way to reach it and there is no single idea of it.
It’s easy to get caught up in all the things we feel like we have to do and we lose track of all the things we enjoy doing. So, while you are building your future, don’t forget that hard work is as much achieved by academic accomplishments as it is my personal development.
Written by: Gauri Ghisai
Editor: Nimrat Kaur
Visuals: Thanh Nguyễn