As you get older, you realize more and more that nobody actually knows what they’re doing. Despite appearances, turning 18 or 21 or even 35 unfortunately does not automatically give you the knowledge that you need to succeed in life at that particular time. In fact, adulting is more often than not just a guessing game of sorts. You utilize your own knowledge of life (however limited it may be), your knowledge of other people’s lives, and what you know about outcomes of past decisions, and simply do what you think will turn out the best.
Multiple times throughout this past school year, I have felt great frustration with the fact that I will never actually be able to know if I am making the best or most correct decision. There is no surety or complete confidence that accompanies the major decisions that I make. If a decision really seemed to feel right, I would often go seek out my friends’ opinions, hoping for them to agree with me and thoroughly support whatever it was that I had chosen. Instead, they would frequently offer me important insight from a different perspective that would push me into reconsideration of my original decision, even if I was so sure seconds prior.
The more that this would happen, the more I began to accept that my decisions in life are only ever my most educated guesses, and not completely informed and calculated or sure to work out. However, once I had come to terms with this reality, it began to actually comfort me.
Life is fun and rich and although I most definitely could have made better decisions in the past, I am infinitely grateful for where I am in life. Every failure of the past has turned to a lesson of the present, and a guide for the future. Some of the things that I am the most grateful for in life are also some of the worst and hardest things that I have had to go through. My somewhat educated guesses have sometimes backfired tremendously, leaving me at a loss and full of regret. However, I have often learned so much from them that the pain and sorrow has been greatly outweighed by the feeling of comfort and preparedness for what is to come.
Emma Dietze 