I was in fourth grade the first time I “fell behind.” The first time I was asked by an adult what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I didn’t have an answer.
To me, it really didn’t seem to matter — it didn’t at all feel like being behind. I had all the time in the world, and I knew it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to keep up that attitude for as long as I’d hoped.
I also remember taking a Career Investigations class in eighth grade, and I shudder as I write about it now. It violated every relaxed and rational approach I had ever taken to college. As a thirteen-year-old barely halfway through middle school, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I still knew I had enough time to figure it out before the end of high school.
This class, however, felt like an overbearing helicopter parent who forced their kids into advanced courses, sports and dreaded group activities from the time they are able to walk — it might not help my case that the teacher of the class to this day was one of the worst I ever had.
To sum it up perfectly, I recall a line of text from one of the first worksheets we were ever given:
Understand I must make a decision now.
To this day, that whole line scares me.
As far as I was concerned, I was barely emerging from childhood and hadn’t come close to breaching the surface of adulthood. I stand by that to this day. While now, in retrospect, I can appreciate that they were trying to accurately prepare us for the future. But surely there is a better and less forceful way than to try and convince middle-schoolers that they are fully-grown adults.
It would have been nice to know exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up through all the classes, guidance counselor meetings and nosy adults, but for me and many, many other people, it simply doesn’t work that way. Interests and passions change over the years, and along with those, it can be seemingly impossible to find a job utilizing those passions that a) exists b) agrees with the lifestyle you want for yourself and c) can stably pay enough for one not to be homeless.
You can push future plans in their faces as forcibly as you like from as young as an age as you like but that much seems uncompromisable.
In the end, it all seems to have been to little avail. Today, as a junior in high school, I still am not sure what I want to do as an adult, where I want to live, how much I want to make, what I want to major in and a plethora of other future problems that have invaded the present since I was at least thirteen or probably younger.
With that unchanged sense of ignorance, my opinion of wasted effort stays with me — effort of a variety of teachers and guidance counselors who wasted their energy trying to instill adult responsibilities onto a child. This isn’t to say I feel like I’m a lost cause, doomed to never conquer college or sustain myself.
It just meant that I wanted to finish being a child before I was thrust into adulthood.
In my mind, I was a child, or at the very least not an adult. I didn’t know much about college, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a child’s responsibility. I stand by that. Foresight is great, but ultimately, life ought to be taken one step at a time. Adults should be adults when they have to be, and children should be able to live out their childhood without the weight of adulthood. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
I still don’t know today whether I dismissed their persistence because I knew better than to worry so early, or because I didn’t know anything about what was good for me. But I hold the faith in what I believed this whole time: it’s okay to take my life one step at a time.
And when then time comes, when I know I can’t escape the entrapping jaws of adulthood any longer, I’ll be ready.
