What I Wish I Knew When I Graduated

elisabethlit (43)in #philosophy • 8 years ago (edited)

Once the rose-colored champagne bubbles had sparkled and subsequently flattened, the reality of my present as being a graduated grown-up dawned on me.

Getting older is a funny, funny thing. You reach an age or milestone in your life that you have thought and fantasized about for as long as you can remember. For me - graduating with bachelor’s degree in Art History and Psychology from the University of Copenhagen, was definitely something I had thought about for many, many years. But here’s when it gets funny: life has turned out almost exactly as I imagined it when I five. And that’s not something you would typically hear from a 22-year old.

When I was five I knew I was going to be an inventor - or an artist, which in my mind was the same thing.

I read so, so many fairytales! Saw Disney movies on repeat! I legit included in my nighttime prayer that I wished I could become a fairy and with a single swoop off my magic wand make everyone happy and healthy. When I thought of adulthood, I saw myself make countless creative projects that would benefit the world somehow. I wished that I always would have the courage to draw outside the line.

As the years past I got those reality-pills most people get at the age between five and eighteen; regular head-spinning-stomach-churning dose of hard reality and disappointments. I turned ten and I still wanted to be an artist/inventor. I had grown a passion for studying and learning, immerse myself in art and stories and held a long break from creating stuff myself and just lean back and learn from others. On a dreary Wednesday afternoon during a ‘career-brainstorming-class’ I was told by my math/career-counselor teacher Morten (45 year old male, very plump, eyebrows as long as my thumb, permanent coffee and tobacco breath): “If you become an artist, then you can’t expect much of a financial security. And inventors - well, that is something from Leonardo Da Vinci’s time”. Thank God, Wednesdays was cake day at the school cafeteria. I after that continued to focus on my studies and did well enough to get into any University degree in Copenhagen, but still at an academic level that would earn me three rejection letters from the Ivy Leagues and from Oxford University in the Great Britain. A whole other story.

Years past and I did not really create the stuff I had told myself and God that I would.

I had forgotten how it felt to be a child and have that creativity naturally flow from me, whenever I wanted it to. Even though I loved studying, it had dried me out. I had in the process of training my mentally capabilities and learning from other’s forgotten to legitimize my spiritual self and creative needs. I had become afraid to create stuff of my own, afraid it was not going to be good enough, to fail, and afraid that it was going to be good enough and succeed. In those important years between the ages of eighteen to twenty-two I continued to learn about life and my position in it. I think there is so much today on ‘finding the right your career-path for you’ and figuring out how to plan your retirement and not enough on how to figure out who you are and why you are here. Figuring out your function in life, is basically figuring out what makes you happy and finding yourself.

Coming back in home and making that full circle.

In the years of infinite confusion and questions I thought I wanted to be a doctor, until I realize I suck at math, a stock broker or a financial analyst, an art dealer, a gallery curator, and then came back again to my dearest ambition I had when I was five. All those fairytales I had read as a kid actually turned out to be the most valuable texts I would ever come across, above any text from any course syllabus, because it taught me about the most essential things in life: about love, about always prioritizing your close relationships above anything else, about tolerance and empathy, about loss, about being afraid for others and of yourself, about being afraid of going on a journey to discover who you really are and what your function is in life, about being afraid of never going to figure it out on that long identity-searching journey, and about coming home after a long journey. Coming back home and finding yourself. I really wish we had been taught a class about these things in school, so I might have taken it more seriously.

Today I am an entrepreneur.

Which is our age’s version of ‘an inventor’ and could not have been happier about it. I get to do the things I love, consulting on creative direction for other startups, make mobile games, make social platforms and other stuff, which I honestly do think will change the reality for some people. No matter of whatever personal stuff that is going on in my life, I will be okay, because at the end of the day I have my family and close relationships and I do things that honestly makes me happy.

I think I have learned that it is good to fail and make mistakes, because that means you are putting yourself out there. I promise God I will always try to improve, always try to learn, always be tolerant of other people’s journeys, fall in live with learning and love life.

Summary:

You will be okay. There is a plan for you.
Don’t prioritize reading schoolbooks over fairytales.
Don’t stop believing in your silly dreams, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that it will come true over night.
Don’t be afraid to fail.
DON’T be afraid to succeed!
Always prioritize close relationships above anything else.
Go beyond your comfort zone.
trial and error. trial and error. TRIAL and ERROR!
Consider this: your function in life is what makes you happy.
Don’t create a grand plan and ‘Life - to-do list’, be flexible about your life’s journey while still acknowledging that there probably is a grander plan with your life.