As I grew up, during my high school years, I have always been asked this question about my future ‘’what do you want to do after high school?’’. In the beginning, it was a question that it has appeared to be normal, but once it is asked one too many times, it is starting to turn into a stressful one.
As my experience with people’s curiosity, be it in a good way or not, was definitely a negative one, I can tell for sure that there are 3 reasons why you should not take any negative opinion into consideration when you plan out your future.
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Your passions will never satisfy everyone around you
When it comes to passions, I can surely say that everyone is different and there is almost no chance that two people will have the exact same passions. They can sometimes be similar, but it is hard to fulfill everyone’s expectations.
For me, it was my family that was the hardest to satisfy. My mother has always supported me with everything I have wanted to do, regardless of the subject, but my father was harder to please. He wanted a certain path for me and my sisters and once I have decided not to follow it, I slowly lost his support.
Apart from them, there were always other relatives that expressed their wishes about my future, and there were not always similar to the others. So, with every discussion I had with the members of my family, my decision was slowly getting further and further away and my passions were starting to be neglected.
When there were no discussions with my family, there were always other people that wanted to talk about my plans for the future. There were teachers, friends, colleagues, and all of them wanted to know, at first, the study program I want to follow for my bachelor’s degree and then, some image of my dream job.
At this point, I had started to forget what was this really about and focused on anyone else, except for me. When I had realized this, it only took me a little while longer and I had finally understood that it really is only about my wishes and my dreams, not about fulfilling anyone else’s expectations.
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After you choose a path, you have to live your life, not anyone else
This point is strongly connected to the previous one, in the sense of realizing that this decision should be taken up to your own rules and expectations.
Imagine this scenario: you end up choosing a career that is nothing like you wanted, you wake up every single day going to a job that you do not like, you are constantly stressed and wish that you would have chosen smarter.
In these circumstances, you see why it would have been better to decide on your own. The people you focused on do not have to live your life, trying to keep up, even in the worst days, they were just there, in the past, trying to induce you their own perspectives of life and, maybe, some of their dreams.
Therefore, my advice is to forget about any other opinion or reaction or judgment, they are just part of our lives and they are actually meant to be the ones that strengthen us.
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A negative reaction does not equal a negative discussion
My final piece of advice that might help you where you are struggling to make a choice is to take everything step by step.
It is clear that people can react negatively to this kind of topic, but this does not mean that the whole discussion with them will be a negative one. They might have something important to teach you.
So don’t worry if you do not know what you want to do after you graduate. You have all of these teenage years to discover yourself to find out more about yourself, just to be sure that you are fulfilling all of your dreams.
