Throughout high school,  especially in my junior and senior years, I’ve been asked what I plan to do with my life a lot. It’s a reasonable and expected question. However I haven’t given a single person a straight answer. Or a true one for that matter because I don’t know. I didn’t know at 16 and I still don’t at 18 and I’m learning that it’s okay. I do have some ideas, but I’m not dead set on anything yet. I think it’s important to know that people don’t need to have their whole life figured out at 16, 18 or even 20. High schoolers get so wrapped up in school and the looming presence of adulthood that they forget they’re young and that this is the time to explore.

I know a number of people who have used high school less as an exploratory period, but more as a preparation for college and their future career. They know what they want to become one day and I think that is awesome, however I have been the other person in the room. The one who wishes to have such a set path for their life. I’ve felt behind compared to my peers because I’m still trying to figure out my future. I’ve gotten extremely stressed out because of this, and I felt like nothing was going to go right for me. I felt that I needed to hurry up and just pick a passion as my future. However, I’m learning that there is no deadline to figuring out your life. When the clock hits midnight on your 18th birthday you are still the same teenager you were the day before.

I’ve always had a wide range of interests. As a kid I liked dancing, exploring and reading, but most of all I loved to draw and paint. I was obsessed with art, I drew constantly and it was my dream to become an artist or art teacher one day. For a long time those were my top career choices. As I got older, -late middle school and into high school, my wide range of hobbies took over and I drifted away from drawing more and more. I still enjoyed art and creative hobbies, but it wasn’t necessarily my passion. I had been so set on drawing being who I am that I felt lost when I started to grow out of it and found different interests.

I have learned to remind myself that there’s still time. I explored interests in high school and I will continue to narrow down those interests in the first two years of college. I enjoy history, photography and reading most of all right now and I plan to explore those deeper in the next two years to decide what I want the rest of college to entail.

It’s important to keep an open mind and remember you’re only a teenager, so there is still time ahead of you to figure things out. Not everyone is going to have the next 20 years of their life planned, and that’s okay. Go on the path that is right for you, even if it’s different from the paths of the people around you. In high school it is so easy to forget that you are young and there is an entire life ahead of you.