I am a notoriously bad navigator. I am ashamed to admit, but nearly every time I get in the car, even just to drive to a friend’s house, GPS is already pulled up just in case I can’t quite remember whether the left I’m supposed to take off Dempster is at Asbury or Oak. Driving with friends, my directional challenges seem to multiply. Whether it is the loud music, friends making conversation, or both, a little over a year of having my license, I have lost track of how many times ‘your other left!’ has been shouted at me.
This lack of a sense of direction literally refers to my driving, but also in many ways to my personality. This is not to say I lack motivation and goals for my future, but more in the sense that, as a child, when someone would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I drew a blank. I never quite knew. There were so many things I wanted to be, and none of them seemed to be viable careers. When I was younger, it was a princess, a mermaid. In elementary school, what I wanted to be morphed into who. I was enthralled by the idea of a lifestyle: A writer living in a Paris penthouse overlooking the Eiffel Tower, a Broadway performer living in Manhattan, the possibilities were endless. How I was going to make this all happen, I had not a single idea, but one thing was for certain: I enjoyed writing about (and drawing) my dream life.
At some point in this early phase of envisioning my future, I decided that I wanted to be a fashion designer. I was thoroughly interested in fashion and dressing my dolls, and every time I put marker to paper, the end result was sure to be a not-proportionally-accurate-but-creative ball gown of some sort. Moving through middle school, I semi-abandoned my fashion dreams, when taking a sewing class, I realized that I wasn’t a very good sewer. I could barely make a cloth bag without having to ask my instructor for help. When finished, one of the straps was twisted the wrong way, with stitches sewn haphazardly over the entire tote.
I saw high school as the place where everything would be figured out – a shining beacon of clarity. Stepping onto the fresh-cut lawn my first day and confidently striding the shiny, waxed floors, I would know exactly who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. After all, high school was going to be a lot like my favorite high school movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I would find my way with as much ease as Ferris cruising the Chicago streets in the red Ferrari. Always being in the right place at the right time – miraculously pulling off every stunt, while simultaneously not breaking a sweat.
Taking Intro to Fashion freshman year dispelled this notion almost immediately. In my eight grade naivety, I had forgotten that even Ferris was left with no idea as to where life would take him by the end of the movie. Sewing still did not come easily to me. The rigid technicality and no-room-for-error approach left me with little opportunity for the creativity I had thought naturally accompanied fashion. Instead, I found myself increasingly turning back to writing. The looseness, the fluidity, the ability to write a jumble of words and find meaning within them attracted me. With arts and culture as a never ending source of inspiration for my writing, my interest in journalism came alive, and that was that.
To this day, when someone asks me if I want to work as a journalist, perhaps write for the New York Times, they say, expecting my immediate gratification, I still freeze up. I still wonder about the other facets of myself that might be restricted if I am confined to the label of “Journalist.” I still feel badly about not being career-driven. I still ask myself why, if I am passionate about many things, have I not figured this all out already.
I know I am not the only person contemplating these questions, and would like to offer some advice for those in similar positions. Firstly, the people who look like they have it figured out, do not. They might arrive at college and realize they hate taking biology, forget their pre-med track, and switch to a psychology major. Second, it is okay to sometimes turn off the GPS and let yourself get lost. So much creativity and passion goes undiscovered when you have tunnel vision about your future and leave no time for exploration. The hobbies you pick up, the people you meet doing them and the many different lanes you will drive down will all get you to where you are supposed to be.
