When you’re in high school, it feels like every decision could be the most important one of your life. Who your friends are, what classes you take and what colleges you get into seem to be the make or break decisions. One wrong choice could ruin your life for the foreseeable future. But if I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that most of the decisions you make in high school aren’t that serious. It often seems like we need to have every step of our lives planned out from the time we walk through the front doors of the school to when we stand on that stage to receive our diplomas, but that simply isn’t the case. For most of high school, we don’t even know who we are, much less who we want to be for the next sixty years. 

As we leave high school, we start to figure out who we are. That means exploring new places and interests. With that exploration, what we want to do with our life is going to change drastically. I’ve gone from wanting to study culture, to linguistics, to engineering in just three years of high school. If sophomore me had it her way, I would’ve left everything I know behind to study a niche that pays poorly. She had no idea how complicated life would get. She stubbornly refused to believe that her interests might change in a few years. I wouldn’t trust that sixteen year old to plan out my entire life, so why was she expected to? There’s a lot that’s going to change in the next five years, so expecting yourself to calculate every single decision is just setting yourself up for failure.