The Window is Open: It’s Cold in Here
Devna Panda
When you’re in college, The Future is an exciting but faraway possibility—replete with new opportunities, a new environment, and a version of you that is miraculously content with yourself and your surroundings. For some of us, it is challenging to conceptualize precisely what that future might look like because there are so many happenings of daily life that are enough to be caught up with. So, when this faraway time draws closer, you find yourself reflecting on the many avenues that might open themselves to you after completing your education.
While having the opportunity to determine what opportunity to pursue is undeniably exciting, the promise of an unending stretch of time—undivided by the semesters we have grown oh-so-familiar with—also brings the fear of potentially wasting time. Personally, nothing scares me as much as the notion of wasted time. I have witnessed firsthand how each decision I have made, whether it seemed big or small at the time, has shaped how my life is unfolding. As a result, the importance of doing what I can to further my goals each day has impressed itself upon me. I am almost ashamed of myself when something gets in the way of that. I fear that if I do not uphold this foresight into how poor present choices might affect me or have the discipline to commit myself to my future, I will be left in a situation that I wholeheartedly regret and for which I have only myself to blame.
In my life, I often find myself balancing many competing interests and hobbies, and it becomes easy to wonder if I am centering the wrong ones. In doing so, I feel a sense of frustration with myself when I envision what my life might have been had I made a different choice at a specific turn. For instance, when I go to parties with my friends in humanities majors, I can feel myself wrestle with self-doubt. What if I had not chosen to study engineering and been an English major instead? My experience would have been vastly different, but I have no way of knowing if that scenario would have been better or what it would have been like at all.
These moments of doubt arise in other aspects of life as well. What if I had chosen to live in a different dormitory? What if I had made more of an effort to pursue that friendship or hadn’t decided to let a different friendship go? The future can be terrifying because of the pain that comes with reflecting on a past that cannot be changed.
Yet, you can not expect yourself to move through life flawlessly. Moreover, resilience is not the absence of negative experiences but the ability to navigate them as they come. In applying this lesson to life after college, I have been reminding myself to make the best out of whatever experience I ultimately engage in. While it may not be perfect, in those moments of frustration, I must focus on the positive rather than blame myself for not finding a better opportunity. Opportunities and experiences are variable, and this expectation of perfection I have been carrying for myself may have harmed me more than benefitted me. I’ve come to a point where I need a place to put this self-criticism and self-doubt down. If this narrative sounds eerily familiar, I urge you to ask if this might also be true for yourself.
This may be the year and the semester where you make more room for empathy for yourself. The possibility of what comes after college can be a source of excitement, not because you are guaranteed to find and land the best opportunity for yourself, but because you will delight in your ability to make the best of things and navigate unfamiliarity with grace and self-compassion.