Plans Shmans.

When you are younger, your perception of time and age is skewed. You think your babysitter, your student teacher, and basically anyone over the age of 15 is old. So you make plans and predictions based off of your skewed idea of time and aging, and sadly, it never quite works out how you planned. When I was younger, I never really pictured myself graduating high school. It’s not that I pictured myself flunking out or anything like that, I just never really mentally got past high school. Then as high school fast approached, I could never picture my life after college. I assumed, much like my mental block of graduating high school, that eventually with time I would be able to picture my life after college. However college came and went. I’m now a year and a half post-grad and I still can’t picture my life after college. High school has a definite end. 4 years and then you move on. College has the same definite end. But the real world? No definite next step, no definite end. And that scares the crap out of me. I think we base our predictions of our lives and our futures by what we grew up with. My parents got married when they were 20 years old, so I kind of assumed that I would finish school and move in with my husband. When you’re young and making plans you never account for the fact that you might be eternally single, or have to move back in with your parents, or move to a random city where you don’t know anybody to chase a dream that you’re not really sure about. It all becomes quite unclear and really nothing like you imagined. My big plan was to graduate, get a job that I loved, move out on my own, fall madly in love, get married, and start having children by the time I was 30. I’m currently 23 and have none of these things. Realistically, at the pace I’m going, I’m not really on track for my plan. Which I’m learning to accept. Plans change. Heck, if I stuck with my childhood plans, I would be living with my best friend Sarah and professional figure skating. Things have a way of working themselves out in due time. I get that, I really do. It’s just hard once you graduate and everyone goes on their own separate paths at their own separate pace. One of my friends is moving to New York to attend grad school at NYU. She’s getting an apartment and living in a big city and studying to get her masters. I can’t help but think how grown up that all sounds. And my other best friend just got engaged and is moving to Kentucky with her fiance. So it’s no wonder I can’t help but feel stuck or left behind. I’ve always moved at a slower pace than everyone else, so I shouldn’t be surprised. So who knows what the future might bring. Honestly, I’m excited to see where life takes me. But I can’t help but feel a little sad for the loss of my childhood plans.

To wrap it up, there’s a song I heard on a CD a friend made for me and the words really hit me while I was driving the other day. There’s a part that says: “Ever since you were a child, you had a picture in your dreams, of how you wanted things to turn out, of what you’d like your life to be. Now you’re living with an image, that you hardly recognize. You don’t have to gloss it over, like everything’s fine.” This is so freeing to me. I know that I can’t dwell on the past, but this just reminds me that it’s okay to feel sad and afraid and confused and stuck when things don’t turn out like you planned. You know what they say, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans”. Haha, God. Haha.