I’ve always been a planner; I like having lists and schedules and I work really well around deadlines. From a very young age I had a plan for my life, granted it changed around more than once, but I always had a path that I could clearly see before me.

In high school, my goal was to graduate in the top percentage of my class, get into a good college, and get as many scholarships as I could. Upon arriving at college, my plan then became doing as well as I could in school so that I could get a good job in something that I enjoyed after graduation. Which seems like a pretty straightforward, foolproof plan on the surface; the problem was that I was so focused, my entire teenage and young adult life, on “being successful and doing something that mattered”, that I never really stopped to consider what that meant for me.

I enjoyed science and I knew that there was going to be a large need for scientists in the future, so there would be plenty of good paying jobs that I could do that would put me in position to make a difference. So naturally when I was picking my major I decided on my favorite part of biology, plant sciences.

The only problem was, once I graduated, I didn’t have a damn idea what I wanted to be doing. Now, I’d just spent 4 years of my life getting this degree in something that I loved and I thought all throughout college that once I graduated, I’d figure out what I wanted to be doing. But here I was, done with college, with no direction whatsoever.

Recently, I read this piece written by G.K. Chesterton called “The Fallacy of Success” and in this piece he talks about how there are people everywhere who try to market books and other forms of advice on “how to be successful” and how those people are full of shit. His point that he makes is that being successful is not hard, you either do it or you lie about doing it. He says that a millionaire is just as successful at being a millionaire as a donkey is in being a donkey; success isn’t difficult, it’s inherent.

I always associated “being successful” with being happy and wealthy and I was so focused on “being successful” that I didn’t really stop to think about what I really wanted outside of what I could do to be successful. The first question that we get asked as kids after all is “what do you want to be when you grow up”? For a long time, I associated my identity as a person with whatever I was doing at the time. When I was going to college, I was a student; when I was working in a school, I was a teacher; when I was working in a lab, I was a researcher. Looking back it was very silly that I put so much stock in what I was doing to make money to define who I was as a person.

So now, for the first time, I find myself at a crossroads with no profession to define myself and needing to evaluate my needs and wants outside of “being successful” and thus far I’ve come up with these.

• I want to live somewhere with seasons.
• I want to write and create art; if I could do that to make money I think I’d be happy, regardless of how much I was making.
• I want to explore my spirituality and witchcraft and get to a point where I’m integrating it into my everyday life consistently.
• I want puppies and kittens surrounding me as often as I can.
• I want music in my life, whether that’s through a career or just in my personal life.
• I want to travel as much as I can.
• I want to live my life as unapologetically as I can, doing what I want without caring what other people think.

It might not seem like a lot, but when you’ve lived your whole life as a person planning every moment to move toward a goal that you weren’t even sure you wanted, it takes a minute to hop out of that mindset and focus on what actually makes you happy; outside of your profession, outside of other people, just within yourself. It’s taken me a little while to get here but now that I am, I think I’d like to explore that for a bit before creating another multi-stepped plan toward a goal that I’m not sure is right for me.