18 Years of Expectations

It was my last year of high school, and I stared at the university’s application page, fingers hovering over the “submit” button. For years, I’d wrestled with what to do with my life, constantly shifting between ideas—firefighter, police officer, maybe even the military. But none of those fit, not really. Then, one day, it clicked: teaching. The idea of standing in front of a classroom, sharing knowledge the way so many influential teachers had for me, felt… right. Those teachers shaped me, inspired me, and I wanted to give that to others.

So I did everything I could to follow that path. I volunteered as a teacher’s assistant for the fifth and sixth graders, tutored my peers in the evenings, and when the time came, I applied. The acceptance letter felt like validation of all the hard work I’d put in.

But a couple months from graduation, I realized I wasn’t unique in my ambition. Half of my classmates wanted to be teachers too. It wasn’t long before doubt started to creep in. Was this really what I wanted, or had I been swept up in the idea of what I should do? I tried to push those thoughts away, but they lingered. I reapplied, this time to the business department, and was accepted.

Still, every so often, I wonder what might have happened if I’d stuck with teaching. Would I have felt fulfilled, shaping young minds? Or would the competition and crowded job market have pushed me away eventually? I guess I’ll never know.

Yet, sometimes I think back to my time as a teacher’s assistant, standing in front of those fifth graders, telling them stories to make lessons more exciting. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those moments sparked something else in me—a love for storytelling. Maybe teaching was never my end goal, but a stepping stone towards something more personal. Writing had been my first dream, the one I’d scribbled about in notebooks as a child. Maybe all these choices, detours, and doubts had led me back to that first, quiet calling.

In the end, I often wonder—did I make these choices, or were they nudges toward a bigger purpose? Was teaching just a chapter, business just a detour, leading me back to what I was meant to do all along: write?