I turned 18 a week ago and I have no clue what I’m actually supposed to do now. Everyone talks about it being this huge milestone and in the days leading up to my birthday I was genuinely bricking it – I was absolutely terrified that something massive would change and my whole life would be flipped upside down. In reality, I still got up at 5am to open presents with my parents like I have done in the 17 previous birthdays, I still ate junk for breakfast, and I was still very happy. I guess it’s that idea of “Hey! You’re an adult now – go live your life!” when in reality I think there’s a bit more of a process to it than that. At least, I hope there is. To be honest, I still feel like I’m 14. Part of that is probably due to covid and I would also imagine that my debilitating mental health problems for 5 years factored into it somewhere.
Anyway, my point is that I’m still not really sure where to go from here – I have to start applying to universities soon and that’s one of the most daunting feelings I’ve ever experienced, mainly because everyone else has at least somewhat of an idea of what they want to do, hell – my best friend has even got a favourite university that she wants to get into. I don’t even know what course to pick. Realistically, I probably wont actually go to university and I imagine I’ll take a gap year at the minimum or go straight into a job or apprenticeship. But who the hell knows, right? That’s exactly my problem – it feels like everyone else knows. Meanwhile, I’m still sitting in my room bed-rotting. Not ideal, to say the least.
Although, there is one thing I can for sure say that feels really weird – I actually want to do something with my life. I want to be in love and have a career and experience things. When I was 13, I truly believed I would be dead by the time I was 15. Now that I’m a proper legal adult, things have changed so much, and I’m desperate to go out and do stuff. That’s one of my main problems from the whole mental health crisis thing I had going on – I had absolutely no aspirations and no plan as to what I wanted to do when I was older, and now I’ve finally reached that fateful “older” age, I have absolutely no fucking idea what I want my job to be, or what I want my life to look like. I can’t help but feel like I’ve missed out on that era of deciding what I want to be and its all sort of being thrown at me all at one, and to be honest it’s a little overwhelming.
However, I’m sure I’ll get there. The best thing is – if I decide something isn’t for me – I can always change what I’m doing. That’s the beauty of the modern world, you don’t have to stick to the same job for your whole life, and you can chop and change however you feel fit (to some extent, of course) but I think that’s great, and overall, I think I’ll be okay. And you will be too.
