For so many years, I've been getting mixed signals - parents telling me that I need to have my life figured out in negative 4 years (aka since the beginning of college), and everyone in my American life (non-Korean professors, advisor, other adults, friends, mentors) telling me that it's okay to be confused and indecisive. It dramatically brings to mind that medieval torture method where they would use four horses, each tied to a major limb of the persecutee, and commanded to run in four different directions. Ouch & AHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhh (oh, it's called dismemberment.)
Obviously this is a huge dramatization because my parents are actually really gracious people, and obviously I want the latter party to be correct and for the former party to hop on the "this is okay" bandwagon.
But I think I'm at that crucial intersection, point of no return, etc etc more more more road/traveling metaphors, of facing the fact: That these two parties will never be in agreement. My mom and dad will simply never be okay with the fact that I might not know what I want to do with my life even after graduation. They will not think it is okay with the slight(ly but surely increasing) chance that I might just end up working at a coffee shop for a little bit after May 17th, workin' that hourly wage and figuring out my career path or doing my grad school applications. They will be ashamed and worried, but more prevailingly, ashamed, because they know that I am not going to spend the rest of my life doing this coffee shop thing. They know that I know that I wouldn't let myself spend the rest of my life doing this because, of the many things I have yet to rule out as my life aspirations, being a full time, career-barista does not make the list. Not because it's not good enough or prestigious enough for me, no, but because it's just not what I was made to do on this earth, and even amidst all the uncertainty I know this. And they know me.
It's stressful enough feeling the pressure you put on yourself for these kinds of decisions, but I just realized that honestly, I am way less worried than my parents are about all this. And what I've been doing this semester is channeling their stress level and not realizing the dys-sync of this with my own level of worry and getting fat from it. Probably. Cortisone and all you know.
Here's what I've been hearing from my parents and channeling, internalizing: "It is already WAY too late for you to be deciding what you want to do with your life. You should be on a track, no, should've been on a track we can ... track, and monitor, and watch and expect incremental and certain growth from. Points A to B to C. It was a mistake to let you grow up with so much freedom, we should have just insisted on a career path from the very beginning. You are so late, so slow. You are thoughtless. You are wasting your talents. You might turn out to be a source of shame and a waste of resources. Prove you won't be; please just pick something - now."
Here's what I truly believe about myself: "Things are going to be okay."
So on that highway down homeward I resolved to stand up for mytrueself, cause who else will? It's useless to lament the state of things I cannot control right now and honestly, in my heart of hearts, am not truly worried about. I want to make my parents happy - but squelching out my own voice just because it says things not in agreement with theirs isn't the way to do this.
Things are going to be okay. Even if my parents don't think so.
Wow I am such a people-pleaser.
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