I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.

I’m a 24 year old college graduate and I honestly have no idea where I’m going or what I’ll be doing in the future.

Typing that terrifies me because it’s an official acknowledgment of some of my biggest fears – that I’ll never amount to anything, that my hometown has indeed trapped me for the rest of my life, that while my friends and peers move forward I’m stuck not doing much. These fears aren’t much in the face of police brutality, violent transphobia and transmisogyny, poverty, environmental disasters – that I do realize.

But these are the fears that keep me up at night sometimes and the ones that plague most of the nagging conversations I have with my parents and older family friends. And to be honest, I don’t want to be like my parents. I love them but I don’t want to be like them. That’s why I left my nursing education and instead graduated with a BA. I want to build off of the life my parents have left me.

I want to keep going forward but right now it feels like my life has been put on pause and I have no idea how to press play. There are so many things that I love and want to pursue that the idea of deciding just one thing to do for the rest of my life is something I think about regularly.

Right now, there doesn’t seem like much I can do but snuggle with the dogs I’m caring for and plan a trip to Iceland that will probably never happen with Of Monsters and Men playing in the background.