At the ripe age of 10 years old, I felt like I had my whole life laid out for me. With both of my parents and all of my uncles in the medical field, I assumed that I was predestined to follow that same path. In a few years, I saw myself having the time of my life in high school (as they misleadingly do in the movies), sparking a hidden passion for medicine, and looking forward to pursuing it at the university of my dreams. Flash forward seven years and I am now in a position I never would have saw myself in.

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My high school experience was not exactly what I'd had in mind growing up. Growing up, I had always performed well in school. It didn't help that the movies always seemed to emphasize the adventures and ignore the weight of academics.

Especially going to a small, academically selective high school, I felt my free time slip through my fingers. Everyone at my own school seemed to have their entire future planned out with a dream job and a five-year goal. I felt the pressure to have it all together before even graduating high school because I was surrounded by people who acted like they did. Leisure time never felt like an option as I felt like I constantly had to compete to keep up with the crowd.

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Still on the path that my family seemed to pave for me, I began volunteering at a hospital doing tasks such as patient discharges, feedings, answering call lights, and restocking isolation carts. Though I did enjoy volunteering there, my desperate search for a spark of passion that could drive me towards a career was vain. I soon realized that it wasn’t the medicine I loved but the interpersonal connections that I got to make.

I enjoyed exercising my ability to present myself through social interactions as I held small conversations with the patients and nurses from my department. However, I was afraid to dive head first into my new interests in marketing and communications, straying away from what I had always thought I'd known.

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Now, as a 17-year-old caught in the middle of the college applications process, I still don't know what the future holds for me. Honestly, sometimes it even feels like I know less about my future at the age I am now than I did at 10 years old. The truth is, despite how it may seem like everyone else has their whole life figured out at this age, almost nobody actually does.

Though it's difficult not to constantly be compared to others, it's important to know that another person's success is not a reflection of your own. Wanting to go off on a whole different path and feeling like you don't know as much about yourself as you thought you did is completely normal. Confusion is a healthy part of growth and that it's perfectly okay to be a work in progress.