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Throughout 2021, I’ve been trying something pretty radical (for me, anyways): listening to myself. Learning how to balance gut feelings with rationality. It took forever to learn the difference between something just not being right for me, and knowing that it was right for me but being afraid of the outcome.
At the end of 2020, it started to sink in that I wasn’t in the right direction. I kept telling my friends that I had always wanted to be a lawyer, so there’s no way things could change, but it suddenly felt wrong to think about myself as a lawyer. I was terrified of this feeling, especially as someone who was nearing the end of her sophomore year. I had been comfortable before—knowing what was ahead of me. I would graduate with a political science degree, go to law school, and become a lawyer. so I stayed, and I worked through the feeling that something wasn’t right.
The beginning of 2021 brought a lot of change into my life. I was grieving a few losses of people that were important to me. And at a pretty pivotal moment in my life, I found the movie Soul. It might sound a little ridiculous for me to be referencing a kids movie, but I often find that the most basic life lessons (the ones that can be found in kids movies) are also the same lessons that adults still haven’t quite figured out yet.
After watching the movie, I couldn’t shake the feeling of seeing someone like Joe Gardener, the main character, have so many regrets and fears about his life’s purpose not being fulfilled. I then realized that the thought of not doing something I felt fulfilled by for the rest of my life—that fear was worse than the fear of leaving comfort and everything I’d known.
So, I changed my major. I threw myself into the things I loved, and that gave me joy, and I removed myself from situations that I felt I had outgrown.
I still have growth to do, but I no longer fear the change that’s associated with that growth. Because the fear of not waking up to a life that I love every day is much worse than the fear of outgrowing previously comfortable situations.
Growth can feel like loss, but that can be a really beautiful thing.
Allison Boarman is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2023.