09 Feb 2017

When I started Year 7 I had a pretty good idea of where I was going in life. I was going to ace Year 12, get into a university course with a really high ATAR cut off, then graduate and jump straight into a super cool and high paying career. Somewhere along the way I’d find someone crazy attractive to settle down with, we’d have an amazing home in Sydney and life would be peachy. The details weren’t exactly clear but the outline of my life plan had been set and I was feeling pretty damn smug with my forward thinking.

In hindsight this plan had literally no substance. But it made sense to me because that’s what I was taught in school. Our school system tell us the ‘right’ way to do life: graduate, go to uni, get a job, buy a house, settle down and start a family. Simple- like following a recipe. Sprinkle in a bit of hard work and perseverance and everyone can reach their end goal.

When I started phase one of my plan: ace the HSC, things started to get a little off track. I spent the majority of Year 12 crying at 3am because I hadn’t managed to memorise all of my English quotes. My friends and I buckled under the pressure to perform. One was diagnosed with moderate depression. One had a panic attack in the middle of English Paper 2. Plenty just straight up stopped giving a shit.

At first I brushed it off as a blip in the grand plan. Only, these ‘blips’ kept getting in the way. I went through intense breakups and stopped talking to people I’d spent the last six years with. The depressing reality of the impossible housing market dawned on me. My shitty casual job seemed to be a black hole I couldn’t get out of.

And I hated uni.

I hated the lectures that I barely stayed awake in, I hated how isolating doing an Arts degree is because it’s hard to find people who are taking the same classes, I hated pulling all-nighters to catch up on assignments and I hated barely being able to put petrol in my car.

But uni was a major stepping stone to success! How could I hate it when everyone had promised me it would be amazing? How could I hate it when I had spent the last thirteen years of my life preparing for it?

Instead of abandoning the grand plan I had set out for myself, I pushed through everything, hoping I could come out the other side with the perfect future I imagined for myself intact.

Spoiler alert: I couldn’t. And it finally dawned on me that maybe this timeline wasn’t going to work out the way I had thought.

The thing is, when you stop staring so intently at an unachievable, perfect future you, you have the time to look at the people around you.

I could finally get a good look at the people who I thought had their shit together; certifiable ‘adults’ who had degrees and full time jobs and health insurance. And I saw that for every single person, their end game had changed since Year 7 and even Year 12. They’d grown up, travelled, met new people, graduated, dropped out of school, ended relationships, moved out of home, moved back in, and quit jobs. They’d given their initial paths a go and when it didn’t exactly go to plan they’d worked with it; changing their life plan to fit how their lives were changing.

It’s easy to look at someone who’s successful and think they have followed a single, linear path to get to where they are. We’re sold this idea that we have to map out our whole lives from high school but I’m not buying it. This system of making us settle on one path when we are seventeen fails us. It doesn’t prepare us for all the shit life throws at you that forces you to change your plans. Everything is constantly changing and we have to change our paths along with it. Let your timeline be defined by new experiences and opportunities and step away from the false idea that there’s one set route you have to follow.