“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oh but sweetie, that’s not for people like you…
Let’s start by stating something we all know to be true: everyone has a “vibe”.
The “tech bro” vibe, the “artsy fartsy” vibe, the “dorky” vibe, a “gamer” vibe, a “sporty” vibe, a “boss babe” vibe, and the list goes on.
We had certain associations as kids maybe.
Perhaps you were the kid who got straight A’s, and your family pinned onto you their hopes and dreams of raising a future doctor.
Maybe you were a rebel, and sculpted your identity around denim and black nail polish.
Were you “not good at math” or “not sciencey”? Did teachers chuckle condescendingly when you announced your dreams to travel the world and backpack across Asia?
Some of us didn’t do intense extracurricular sports as kids, so for the rest of time immemorial, we are simply “not athletic”. A decade later, when you start training for a marathon and taking creatine, the peanut gallery is alive with chatter.
We struggled with a single physics class in college, so gave up on becoming engineers. The whole class was white males with vitamin D deficiency anyway. You have melanin and XX chromosomes. Is it a sign?
Once, when frying an egg, you set the fire alarm off, so you decided “I’m just not a good cook”. Someone ate your innocent first attempts at some “easy, 30-minute” casserole a lady on Instagram made, and everyone thought it was too salty.
So you put away your apron and never stepped foot in the kitchen again. It’s just not “your thing”.
Don’t change your mind.
But what happens when you decide that despite almost failing Algebra I, you want to build a rocket ship?
Yes, you burnt that egg once when you were thirteen, but now you want to make a frittata to impress your snobby friend who only cooks recipes from the New York Times.
The “vibe” that once seemed almost predetermined- that seemed so entrenched in how other people saw you that it became you for a bit- becomes a prison.
But Sofia, you’re a writer!
This is what happened to me.
I have always been a writer, a crepuscular moody introvert whose creative juices come alive between midnight and 3am.
Guess which ungainly middle schooler with a skirt down to her ankles once made her short stories about murder, betrayal, and “no-one-understands-me”-ness?
Yeah, it was probably (always) me.
Ever since I was little, this was simply how I made sense of the world.
It was not through human conversation, but through effusive journal entries, a pile of unfinished drafts in my Google Drive, and reading books way past my bedtime.
So naturally, the societal algorithm destined me toward either law, journalism, or eclectic writerly isolation.
As such, my loved ones were perplexed when I started talking about nanotechnology, coral reefs, seagrass, and mycelium bricks.
It didn’t fit my “vibe”.
I was an error message everyone rushed to debug.
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” -Henry David Thoreau
In Denial
How does one reckon with being naturally interested in all the wrong, mismatched things?
Well, usually it’s through denial.
So I swung around, leaning into different molds I thought would satisfy my curiosity and leverage my skills, feeling more and more like I didn’t quite belong anywhere.
In fact, it took years until I finally found the right balance between my interests, and became comfortable with resisting the prison of other people’s assumptions of what you “should” be.
Now, I have no problem with being both the scientist and the artist, with being a Renaissance woman, with being at the intersections, with defining my career from the ground up.
What I Learned From Having Mixed Vibes
#1: There are ways to say “I don’t know” without sounding like a loser.
When I was in high school, at that stress-induced time when everyone was applying for university and announcing their ambitions to proud (or disappointed) audiences, I felt utterly stuck.
When everyone around me seemed to have a simple, digestible 5-year plan for their life, I was caught in a web of indecision, overwhelmed by the fact that I simply had no idea what to do and where to go.
There was this rush to get to that enlightened point of certainty, to have an answer people would be impressed with.
Fast forward several years later, when all those same people with shiny aspirations have now changed their major seven times, paused their degree for a gap year, or doubted and questioned themselves many a late night.
Now, there is something I know with certainty: none of us really knew.
We wanted so desperately to have a plan. Our parents wanted us to have a plan. So they told us to study something “safe” like medicine or engineering.
The lady from down the street asked about the plan too, and told us we should really consider studying AI because it’s all the rage.
Our teachers advised a plan (“Oh Sally, you would be a wonderful candidate for studying French. You would absolutely love it!”).
But that doesn’t change the fact that you still don’t know.
Now I’m halfway through college, and while I know more, and have significantly more clarity about my future than I did then, there are still lots of questions.
What’s the difference?
Now I know how to say “I don’t know” with confidence and authority.
I say “I don’t know, but this is what I’m thinking…” or “I don’t know, and this is what I’m doing to get closer to an answer.”
#2: You don’t need labels. You need data.
Let’s talk about how we’re all lazy but desperate and insecure egomaniacs.
I mean, let’s be honest, it’s kind of fun to go home for holidays and to nonchalantly throw around phrases that make it sound like you have your life together.
It’s reassuring to talk about your super-committed, always-romantic “green-flag” boyfriend who makes six figures and volunteers at the animal shelter every weekend.
We would love to talk about how we landed that coveted Google internship, and like Elle Woods, act like it was no big deal (What, like it’s hard?).
On the other hand, it can feel discouraging to be the single, not-yet-sure, maybe-maybe-not one with horror stories in place of victories.
But actually, taking your time can be an incredible strength, and land you in a way more aligned decision in the long-run.
When I took a gap year, it was easy to feel behind as my friends raced ahead and settled into college. Meanwhile, I took the year to try out different passion projects, jobs, internships, courses, and athletic challenges.
It was the pause before the next chapter of my life, and it made all the difference.
Having the space to fail, to test, to messily realize both what I didn’t know that I thought I knew, and what I knew that I thought was a mystery, gave me the confidence to use my time in college to get even more narrow.
I learned to not simply ask what I would like to do, but to instead consider what I’m already building/learning/exploring, and why it works or doesn’t.
Then, with that information, I find new ideas to test, curating these options based on my interests and skills already.
#3: Your dreams set the scale.
I used to think mood boards and “manifestations” were a bunch of fluffy nonsense…until I tried them.
Giving myself permission to imagine my dream life, dream career, dream love, dream home, and more, made me realize that none of it was actually out of reach.
This changed my mindset about success completely.
I realized that half of “succeeding” is giving yourself permission to pursue.
It’s about giving yourself permission to go for it, even if the “thing” you’re going for is wildly ambitious. Often, we shut ourselves down before even considering the logistics.
The answer is simple: allow yourself to imagine that “impossible” life, the one you stopped believing in because someone told you it wasn’t “realistic”. Don’t stop yourself when the “what if…” thoughts roll in.
“I realized that half of ‘succeeding’ is giving yourself permission to pursue.”
It might be geographical: “What if I lived on the beach and had seventeen dogs?”
It might be entrepreneurial: “What if I owned a coffee shop that was also a pottery studio?”
Maybe it’s about a creative project or an educational pursuit: “What if I directed a short film and went back to school to study medieval poetry?”
Let yourself dream again, and let those dreams exist in your mind long enough for you to actually treat them seriously.
#4: Most decisions aren’t binary.
You contain multidudes.
So I’ll be the first to assure you it’s not a problem to be fixed, but rather a strength to be nurtured.
Sometimes you think you have to choose between two sides of yourself, and you actually don’t.
I thought I had to choose between a “sciencey” path and an “artsy and humanities path”, and I found I could have both in my life, at just the level I wanted them.
I realized it’s not a choice between being either a starving artist or a creatively-repressed robot who never produces or creates anything.
There’s a gradient.
You can also be: an artist with a day job, an artist who also does freelance work, a hobbyist, someone who starts out with a day job and transitions to being an artist full time.
Personally, I’ve made the decision that I don’t want my art to be my main income source. I simply don’t want financial pressure on my creativity.
That said, I still take my creative pursuits seriously even if it’s not how I plan to make money.
In reality, when it comes to career paths, it’s usually not a choice between “do” or “don’t” but more so a question of “how” and “to what extent”.
“When it comes to career paths, it’s usually not a choice between “do” or “don’t” but more so a question of “how” and “to what extent”.”
#5: Your education is only as good as how you keep learning.
Going to college for me is about learning how to self-educate once I’m done.
It’s about learning how to think, conversate, read, how to study and pursue opportunities.
College teaches me how to engage with peers and people who are experts in their field, and about what I want to learn more about and to what extent.
We live in a world that places a huge emphasis on pieces of paper that say what you did, when, and with what institution.
But once you have those pieces of paper, what really gets you across the line is those skills you actually acquired.
So yes, degrees are useful tools, but what affects you most over the course of your life is how you independently develop knowledge and wisdom.
I Gave Up The Search.
The biggest misconception I had about building a career that blends, and diverges, and takes its own unique shape, is that I had to “find” it.
The truth ended up being that a career isn’t something you find; it’s something you build.
How do you build it?
With the small decisions to pursue a project or not, to apply for a certain role or not, to reach out to a person in a certain field or not.
It’s about finally giving yourself permission to define what a dream job can be, and then being bold enough to make it a reality.
“If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Thought to Action
- Treat Your Life Like a Lab: Reframe one uncertainty as an experiment instead of a decision.
- Shorten the Feedback Loop: Ask: how can I learn something in a week instead of a year?
- Document What You Learn: Keep a simple log: what I tried, what happened, what surprised me.
- Detach Outcome From Worth: Let experiments succeed or fail without meaning anything about you.
- Practice Staying in Motion: When something doesn’t work, don’t restart. Adjust and continue.
Sources
No external sources were used for this post.
Leave a Reply