A letter to people who are worried because they don't know what to do with their lives.

I took the road less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost

Today I lost my job, got locked out, got stuck in a tiny window trying to climb back in and started this blog. My name is Eliza Turner and recently i've been stuck by this floating feeling. A feeling that i'm wasting my life. From a young age I had my life mapped out; I made large sweeping statements and stuck to them: I was decisive. At some point this decisiveness became hazy. I traded in my black and white for grey. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life anymore. Did I really want to be a doctor?

I'm taking a year out of medical school to regroup and I suppose work out the meaning of my life and I thought i'd start this blog to make a collection of my reflections. What have I learnt so far?

I've learnt that 'not knowing what you want to do with your life' is a problematic symptom of privilege and opportunity. The world is my oyster; I've got the world at my feet: more than two roads diverge in a yellow wood and and I, like many of us in our generation, feel sorry we can not take them all. With so much opportunity ahead of us we find it cripplingly hard to give something or someone all of ourselves. When we are told we can be anything we want to be, settling on that anything can be confusing. 

But it can important to settle to sharpen your focus. Goodwin RE et al. argue that by nature to strive is to settle. To decide one wants to become an incredibly successful anything means giving up the chance to explore other paths to fruition. Although, should she desire, she can skim through the New Scientist, Beyoncé will never be a famous physicist. I imagine Barack Obama doesn't lose much sleep over the fact he will never win the Turner prize. That isn't to say that not knowing what you want to be when you grow up right now matters: Colonel Sanders only found his crunchy fried calling in life at age 65. If your still feeling anxiety over your indecisiveness, it can help to to gain some perspective to realise how unimportant the decision may be. 

Consider that there are 7 billion people in the world and that every time you refresh the world clock counter homepage, the number climbs. Ponder over the fact that 99% of your body is made up of just six elements:oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Consider that when you die you will biodegrade and all of those elements will turn into seas and mountains and mountain goats. When you die you will probably be forgotten within 50 years. In 100 years, chances are nobody will even remember you ever existed. That may sound daunting but it can be an incredibly comforting reminder to live in the moment.

Having said that, it's important to remember that delayed gratification is a thing. Work hard and be nice to people you find annoying because it will pay of for you and make you happy. But don't put in to much effort for too little returns. Don't stress about getting something done everyday or you'll waste your life running errands and be too tired to have fun. 

Thats what I've learnt this year so far. Except I already knew it. I wrote the exact same thing down following a previous existential crisis following a life altering minor break up. The kind of trivial break-up that requires psychotherapy for both breakees after. The kind of break up where you break into their house in the middle of the night and hide behind a curtain crying with their cat.

Another thing i've learnt is that life doesn't tell stories. You're life is a series of unfortunate events and somehow you get somewhere good or bad. We all want a narrative. We all want to sit in heaven and tell are lost relatives 'the story of our lives'. We want a moral at the end not a cliff hanger and we want it all to have a deep meaning. But 99% of the stuff that happens doesn't change anything or add to your plot. And you just have to get on with it and ride the rollercoaster like Ronan Keating Tells you to. And sometimes you have to learn life's lessons over and over again.