"What If..."

Fair warning: this blog isn't always going to be pretty. It might on some days, if I talk about the brand new nail polish I got at the grocery store last week ("mint" and believe me it is adorable) or if I share my insights into the latest movie we watched in my History of Motion Pictures class, but those are the filler posts. This blog is really about the nitty gritty mire that comes along with trying to hammer together a future out of nothing but whimsical dreams. Today is a nitty gritty post.

There are two words that ring horror into the hearts of all college seniors. Only two syllables, and containing six letters, they have the power to set minds reeling, plans to reorganizing, and hearts questioning. They are "what if." These two little words reared their ugly little head in my mind earlier this week, and I've been contemplating how to address this topic with reflection and insight instead of an anxious panic since then. Really, I just had to wait until the manic voices in my head quieted before I could write.

What if?
1). What if I'm signing away the next 7 years of my life to do something I don't really want to do?
2). What if I don't get into Graduate School
3). What if I do get into Graduate School and graduate only to be unable to find a job and wind up starving (which I could have done without the PhD) or, worse yet find myself doing a job I could have started with a BA.
4). What if what I want to be is not what I want to be and what I really want to be is something that I haven't considered yet?

essentially speaking: What if I'm screwing this all up?

Gets confusing right? Add to this a crisis of personality because I've always known exactly where I'm going and what I'm doing and you pretty much have summed me up on Monday night.

The simple fact is that things are scary. I'm standing at the cross roads of taking all my plans and dreams and putting them in reality, something I've never really had to do before. Even when I started college, there wasn't much of an option. I had to go to college, not choice there. Baylor was just my love, no choice there either. Now I'm faced with plenty of choices, even choices that I thought I had already decided on. I want to take no risks, want to know everything will work out the way I plan it... it's my personality. Unfortunately, we don't get guarantees like this in life. We must have Faith. But let me tell you Faith is hard.

It may surprise some of you, but I don't consider myself to have really had a crisis of Faith. (Faith meaning the knowledge that everything will work itself out, not Faith in God. Though, I don't consider myself to have ever had a crisis of Faith in God either). When someone comes to you and says that you have cancer there aren't a whole lot of options you can take. The road seems pretty straight forward. You do what you gotta do. But here, standing on the edge of an abyss that I get to fill with the things that will define my life, there are a multitude of choices. How do you know what to choose?! The reality is that they're pseudo choices. They appear real, but they're not. I made the choice to go to graduate school, and the outcome of that choice (whether I get in or I don't) will guide me to the next choice. As mom says "we can't screw this up." I'm learning that if you move slow enough and pay attention things will just fall into place (they always have) and in reality no choice is set in stone. The game can still go anyway it wants to, and when you put it that way "what if" isn't so scary. In fact, it's sort of a mysterious adventure.