This past year has brought me to several pivotal professional, personal, and emotional crossroads in my life. Some were thrusted upon me, actions and decisions I never thought I would need to make so early in my life; and others I chose to undertake in search of perhaps less pragmatic, more ambitious paths. College may have been about exploring, expanding, and surpassing the limitations of my energy, intelligence, and passions, but the real world has left me with what the grim prospects of true “adulthood” is to be for the next 60 years of my life.
I have graduated from college with a double degree and a minor, moved back and left home within a week, stood up to my father for the first time in my life and had the ability to follow through, have had three blessedly short job searches, left two equally promising yet un-gratifying careers, supported my best friend through her marriage and pregnancy, applied for graduate school, found an apartment with my boyfriend, and have saved up enough money to pay off my rent, student loans, daily expenditures, and still have a bit left over for the car or graduate school fund I hope to one day need. Recounting all of this only reminds me of what I look ahead to: the looming expectations of graduate school, studying for the new GRE and what I hope to be a clincher for my admissions, making the transition back home as I reconcile with my father, deciding which path of Educational and Developmental Psychology I will pursue.
Yet despite all of this, I hope that 2012 will remind me that I’m just yet 22; I still have the whole world before me, a life yet unweighted with anything but my own ambitions. To lose sight of that would be to squander the youth I have left in me mourning for my uninhibited days, instead of freely pursuing the things I love most while I still can.
