My career counselor tells me everything will fall together, that she isn't worried about me. She tells me to learn to live in the moment. I think she uses the words "personal spirit."
I tell her perhaps she has been watching too much Oprah.
But even as I leave her office, I know she is right. Those who major in overachievement like I have don't end up in boxes on the side of the street panhandling loose change. (Or do they?)
Since walking onto this campus I have filled entire journals with my haphazard thoughts, all of them focusing on the question, "What next?" I assured myself the answers would come and that I had time to figure things out - that my "aha" moment would eventually arrive and my future career would fall into place like magnetic puzzle pieces.
However, it never did, and time keeps plugging away. I sometimes fear it has passed me by, or it won't come for a long, long time from now when I no longer have the energy to embrace it.
This is my senior year. How did that happen? Don't laugh fellow 2007 graduates because I know you're thinking it too. The beginning of the end is just around the corner.
May for me is a blank slate. It is both incredibly awesome and incredibly scary. It's embarrassing to admit, but I lost hair over it this summer, landing me a visit with the doctor's office. "It's just stress," they assure me.
I have the entire world at my fingertips - we all do - and it is the only time in our life we will ever be able to say that. We all worry that we aren't headed in the right direction, that we're in our major for the wrong reasons, or that we won't eventually have a salary large enough to support all that we want to do with our lives. Travel. We all want to travel.
We all worry we will wake up a few years from now, overwhelmed with sweet regret at the choice's we've made. I know I am not alone, but somehow it isn't comforting. It only reminds me I am one of many.
Perhaps it's a matter of mind over matter. If we are creative enough to dream big, and courageous enough to try, we might be lucky enough to happen upon our own personal success.
"Lost on your career path?" asks a large looming board from the career department office. Heck yes. But then again, I get lost driving home.
After reading The Alchemist in preparation for this month's Spectrum Book Club, I have taken to calling my lack of resolve for my future a pilgrimage. It sounds a lot more intelligent than "I don't know" or "I'm figuring it out." Now I can say, "I'm on a pilgrimage of self discovery to find my personal legend. So there." It's much more interesting.
I should be a case study for those who research nervous breakdowns in America's youth.
"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting," writes Paulo Coehlo, author of The Alchemist. I suppose I will have to be satisfied with that, and hope for the best.
Across the newsroom, a fellow editor begins laughing so loudly tears come to her eyes. She has been staring at her computer screen for five hours straight. A desk over, one of the managing editors gives his belt to a sports editor off to a press conference whose pants are falling down. Shinedown's A Simple Man plays in my ears and calms me down after a day of production.
I smile. For now, at least, I have the routine of school, and the newspaper I've been contributing to for the last three years that has ingrained itself in my heart.
Working alongside the people who are most like yourself - there is nothing more satisfying.
"You came so that you could learn about your dreams," says the old gypsy woman in The Alchemist.
These words echo in my ears. We have all come to UB to find our place, and, whether or not we are confident, once we walk away the things we learn about ourselves will hopefully help to fill in the missing pieces. Personal legends are realized gradually.
Maybe I'm not as lost as I think.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
