Em's Adventures

Warning: Philosophical post to follow

I was thinking the other day, if we’re so young and this is so difficult, what am I going to do for the rest of my life?

I imagined that life gets more difficult as you go on – at the beginning, you do nothing for yourself except breathe and look cute. Then you keep increasing the amount of things you can do…eat, walk, talk, read, drive, etc. until what point? When do you stop learning?

Of course, the answer is never, you learn something new every day they say, but at some point, there will be a line that you cross when what you’re learning is not essential to your life. But before that line is the gray area where you think what you are learning is not essential, important, relevant, etc. and this is where people lose momentum. For some, this gray area can start in middle school or high school. For me, it was university.

For my entire grade 1-12 education, I went to college preparatory schools. Everything led to college. College was the goal, the end, and if you don’t get there, you are nothing in life. So of course, motivation to be someone and not be useless led me to taking honours and AP classes, trying in all of my classes, and despite all of the frustrations that I had, I was still able to move on and conquer because the end was near. I was almost done.

They were right, I was done. But not in the sense that I had imagined. In my dream world, university was a place where you were free. Free to take whatever classes you wanted, free to come and go as you please, free to dye your hair blue, free to wear your pajamas to class, etc. Which of course, in my real world, you can do, but for a price. Done means that and also being done with guidance, structure, people helping you learn, and people helping you in general (clean, cook, laundry).

You’re at the bottom of the food chain again, like a new-born baby you’re a new-born adult. You move from a dorm to a quad to an apartment to a house. You cook for yourself, do your own laundry, take care of yourself.  You live in a state of constant confusion from overloading yourself with new material every single day. You fear what will happen if you don’t learn it or fall behind. And you’re learning more than you did in high school, with added responsibilities and without support.

But luckily, things get better from here (or so my crystal ball tells me). You still learn, you still move up and on in life, but you have your basics. You have a degree. You can live by yourself. You know how to do your job. But that’s not to say that life after university is easy – it has its own challenges, yet you’ll be better equipped when problems arise.