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I’ve always been so sure of what I wanted to do with my life. As soon as I graduated high school, I would go on to graduate college, and then to graduate law school and get a career in that field.
Then a pandemic hit and made me question a lot of things. Especially my future plans.
Since I’ve been social distancing for almost a year now, a lot has changed, both in my personal life and all over the world. I lost family members during that time, and by the end of 2020, I was looking at my own life so much more carefully. I started looking into more and more ways that I could grow as a person, and I am still growing every day.
While I was in this period of rethinking my plans, the movie Soul came out. It’s not every day that a Disney movie makes me think that hard about such a deep topic, but the movie has stuck with me ever since. In the movie, the main character dies immediately after getting his absolute dream job. While trying to get back to Earth to get back to his job, he realizes that life doesn’t happen when you finally have some goal or dream that you’ve made for yourself. Life is always happening, and if you constantly focus on the future, you’ll miss all of the things that make life good.
Watching that movie, after a year that has brought so much grief and anxiety over the future, both made things clearer and fuzzier at the same time. I now realize that I can’t stay on the same path just because it’s comfortable. I can’t do something I don’t enjoy for the rest of my life just because it was the path I set for myself in middle school. But I also have no clue what that means for my future life path.
I don’t know whether I’ll end up applying to law school in less than two years. I’ve always loved being creative, and I may end up going down a more creative path in the future, rather than ending up in a law firm. I still really enjoy some aspects of law, and I’m certainly not going to rule that path out right now, but I want to explore other things that I truly love. I can’t settle for a path just because it’s what I’ve known for such a long time.
After all of the growth I’ve done, and the growth I’m still going through, I can’t wait for what 2021 will bring. I look forward to living in the present and appreciating everything I have now.
Allison Boarman is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2023. She is studying political science, philosophy, and economics at the University of Louisville.