So, this was the most popular topic chosen from my Instagram survey. Are you guys all okay?

Well… thanks to you, I find myself grappling with existential dread on a Monday morning as reality overturns expectations of a fun thought experiment to get my creative juices flowing. I take it, since this was by far the most chosen topic, that you all are feeling some pressure to figure your sh*t out? Either that, or you were just intrigued to see what I would come up with. Well, since you asked, come with me as I lead you down the corridors of my human mind, through the long, dank insecurities of the past, and then to the left (in a box), we’ll find my hopes and dreams of the future. Does it help to remember that we are indeed glued by gravity to a rock spinning out in the middle of absolute bumf#ck nowhere, where nobody knows where we come from, nobody knows where we go, and most of all, nobody knows why? Maybe it helps; maybe it just adds to the massive pile of anxiety already on the verge of toppling over. Who am I to say, really? As I can only speak for myself, and as this is what I do best, please allow me as I continue to do so. 

I, for one, am under a significant amount of pressure to figure my sh*t out. When I first started this blog, I was 22 years old, on the verge of great adventure, and with the majority of my 20s ahead of me. I remember that rush of freedom that came with a one-way ticket and a little extra money, the purposeful decision to be a bit reckless, knowing that I had time on my side to smooth out the creases. 

I speak often of my decision to drop out of college at 20, as it was perhaps the most pivotal decision of my life thus far. And the years that followed, working retail at a chocolate shop and at the desk of a downtown hostel. I had never before had my own money or a full-time job at that, and for the most part, I quite enjoyed the mental break from full-time school. I focused on finding my footing in a more adult world, and I found comfort in a routine that didn’t pick and prod at my self-esteem and my finances the way that school did. I spent eight years telling myself and everyone who would listen that I planned on returning to school, but I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that my identity as a college drop-out would follow me around for the rest of my career like a shadow, casting darkness on all of the other aspects and accomplishments that have highlighted and defined my character.

For many years, I have nursed the wounds of shying away from school by proving to myself time and time again that I don’t need it to gain experience by taking my education into my own hands, learning what I pleased, where I pleased. Yoga in Rishikesh, Buddhism in the Himalayan Mountains, Au Pairing in Berlin, permaculture in San Jose and on the Caribbean Coast, journalism and Communications in Oaxaca … I also learned other things that I wouldn’t include on a resume. Like how to hold twin three-year-olds on either hip while cooking their favorite pasta dish and singing Baby Shark do do do do do, and how to feel right at home in a cafe in a foreign country, thousands of miles away from anything or anyone familiar. I’ve learned how to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak the same language using hand gestures and educated guesses (although embarrassingly, I have not managed to actually learn another language). I’ve learned how to tend to my passport as if it were my heart outside my body. I’ve learned how exciting life can be on the road and how when you’re backpacking, life jam packs so many lessons into the smallest pockets of time that when you’re finally back home, you need extra time to spend keeled over and panting, wondering what just happened to you.

Most of all, I’ve learned that if I don’t ever take the time to write it all down, everything I’ve ever done since dropping out of college will be lost to my poor memory. I don’t get handed a diploma for paving my own way, and that is why I must write my own. 

This blog has been that for me, or the closest thing I’ve had to it. Every time the annual fee of $89.99 rolls around to pay for my domain and web page, even if I haven’t written a single blog all year, I suck in through my teeth and run my card. Someday, I think, it will come to my rescue, it will land in the right lap. Someday it will be the vine that grows so tall that it will reach and wrap around the branch that will lift me into the next phase of my career. And not the career that I am planning for myself as a backup, something having to do with digital marketing and SEO research, but the one I am craving. The one that appreciates my creativity and honors my appetite for adventure. 

So, since I already have my degree in Wishful Thinking from the University of Waiting Around and Seeing What Happens, I have finally decided to go back to school to complete my bachelor’s degree in Communications and Media. 

Will this solve all my problems? Of course not. But I am no longer in my early twenties with plenty of time to splish splash around in. I know that a bachelor’s degree doesn’t mean what it used to, although it does significantly increase my chances of landing an internship and expanding my network, and it does open up the opportunity to pursue a master’s later on if I find myself with the time and the resources to do so.

So here I am in Athens, Greece, just a week and a half shy of completing my first semester as a Sophomore. Do I wonder all the time what would have happened if I had just stuck it out a year and a half longer and finished my literature degree eight years ago? How much further along in a career might I be? How unskilled might I be at holding four plates of steaming hot food at the same time? How uncultured? How financially stable? Yes, of course, all the freaking time. Do I wonder what all the 19 and 20 year olds in my classes must think of me, nearly a decade their senior? Duh. (Although I have to say that thanks to my babyface, I manage to blend in well). Do I sometimes wonder if I am making a mistake by finishing school so late, using these last years of my twenties to wrap something up I started in my early twenties when I could just as well be using this time and the money I made serving tables to galavant around more unexplored parts of the world, continuing to test my luck in becoming a successful travel blogger? More than you know. Am I insanely proud of myself for dragging myself back to an institution that crushed my self-esteem the first time around, at an age where many people are getting married and having babies? Hell yeah.

Does it help at all to remind myself that, at the end of the day, I am a simple servant of gravity, stuck to a rotating rock orbiting a space-time continuum that my little linear brain cannot fully comprehend and that, most likely, at the end of the day, nothing really matters?

Yeah, actually, it kinda does. *Cue big breath out. So, there you have it. Now, enough about me; tell me what you think of me feeling a ton of pressure and using escapism and the mass unknown to skirt the unbearable weight of reality.