Words by: Shanya Sylvester 
Art by: Jess Heng

When was sixteen, I had my entire life mapped out with no room for deviation.

I was going to graduate from high school with a great ATAR score, then graduate from university in three years, before nabbing a well-paying job at a respectable company. This was all going to come together so that I could live the kind of life that fascinated me like those in the movies and media I grew up consuming: the glamorous, self-assured twenty-something, who flourished in the pursuit of her goals.

I would meet a nice guy who could survive the awkwardness of family introductions and we would be married by the time I was 26. After a couple of years of wedded bliss, I would become a mother at 28, and we would all live happily ever after. The end.

Cut to the middle of the pandemic. From afar, I observed all of my friends welcoming the disruption to their study schedule, jumping at the chance to finish their degrees while the world shifted online. thought that I too could have done the same, carrying out my goal of graduating on time. But I quickly learned that life has a way of throwing a few curveballs at you just when you think you’ve got it figured out.

I started my degree in 2017 as a psychology major, a degree I chose because my Year 11 psychology class was the subject I loved the most during high school. Two years into this degree, I discovered something that was kind of pivotal to the pursuit of a psychology degree: I actually hated this course. So, in 2019 switched paths and settled on my Media Communications degree. Once again, thinking I could knock it out in three years I went in guns blazing. But alas, my full-time course load would not cooperate with the part-time hours I was working at my 9-5 job. All of a sudden, my three-year degree became a six-year degree. Couple these academic disruptions with the seemingly never-ending self-discovery of a 20-year-old girl and you have yourself a changed woman. A woman whose ambitions never seemed too far out of reach until she began an active pursuit of them.

Here is an inconclusive list of all the things did instead of graduating in 2020 like I was ‘supposed to’:

I fell in love. I cared for my cancer-stricken mother. watched the world change more and more each day. I failed a subject (or two). worked part-time. I learned that every existential crisis I had prior to this time paled in comparison to the new ones I had begun to endure. I came out to my family. travelled the world. I watched my friends graduate and move forward at what felt like a freakishly rapid pace. I resented the fact that my timeline kept getting blown out of the water by things I had no hope of controlling. lost my mother. I nurtured my relationship with my father. I got a dog. adjusted, readjusted and then adjusted some more for good measure. I became a totally different person, over and over again.

I made peace with the events that diminished any hope of my ‘life plan’ panning out how I thought it would. And I think, ironically, all these extra bumps in the road have made me more of a well-rounded person than the original plan would have.

Now I’m 25 and it seems unfathomable to think that my life goals would just stop once I had kids. Losing my mum at an age where I began to relate to her experiences as a woman woke me up to the reality that our hopes, passions and dreams never really stop as we get older. They just evolve alongside us.

Planning out stages of my adulthood in such detail taught me important lessons. I realised demanding that my achievements occur by a specific age wreaked havoc on my sense of self. It also transformed my fear of change into a fear of failure, something far more detrimental to a young woman trying to make her way in the world.

I used to be really terrified of change. The inability to predict what comes next can be so blinding at times that we forget to consider that there could be so much more if we stop being so stubborn and just let life do its thing. Life’s going to give you lemons anyway, but who said lemons are only good for lemonade?