It's past midnight and past my bedtime but I thought I'd take a couple of minutes to write something here.

I don't know where to start - I never really do - but let me just jump right in. Things have happened and continue to keep happening: bad things, not so bad things, strange things, sobering things, different things. Things.
Things that I won't tell you, things that are best kept quiet, things only uttered over lukewarm paper cups of milky coffee on late nights, empty streets and cold winds.

The nature of such things aren't entirely relevant to whatever I might want to say right now anyway.

I think I finally know what I want to do with my life.

Sorry to get all emo-shemo and existentialist but isn't that what we're all doing anyway.
We all pretend to know what we're doing, we all pretend to be so secure in our present condition, we scoff and rattle off page after page of prospective future plans and careers, checking boxes down the proverbial bucket lists.
We enjoy seeking false comfort in the pretense that everything that happens to us was either planned or was in some way a small (yet critical) part of the grand scheme of your Life Plan.

But we're all just fumbling around in the dark,
bouncing off the walls as we go.

We don't know what we're doing.
We don't know why we put ourselves through decades of schooling, we don't know why we move away and then move back. We don't know what kind of job we want, whether we want a job or not.
We don't know whether or not we want to get married; if we do, we don't know when we want that day to come.
We don't know if we're career-driven or family-driven, we're all probably a bit of both but how many parts career to family or vice versa? We don't know.

We pretend we do.
She wants a Masters or a PhD, she says. Work experience for a couple of years and then she might consider law school as a career change, she says.
Married by 28, three kids and a pretty little townhouse upstate.
He plans to start up his own business by 25. Tending to his investments while he learns a new language. Perhaps relocate to China or Brazil; family can wait.
We rehearse these stories often; practising our lines whenever a family member or prospective employer starts up a conversation and asks.

But we really don't know.
None of us do.

And yet, strangely enough, thousands of miles away - I am very literally almost the furthest possible I can get from home; 12 hours behind, on the very other side of the Earth - it's here, in this strange city, the capital of the Western world, that I think...
I'm finally beginning to separate the threads of things I should want and the things I really do want,
and I think I'm finally beginning to untangle what I really want to do and see myself doing after I finish school.

A little over 20 years of people asking me what I want to be when I grow up
Lying through my teeth all over my personal statements and statements of purpose and interviews and networking conversations - pretending, consistently pretending (very convincingly though, might I add) that I know exactly where my interests and ambitions lie.

Hell, I don't even know how I got here.
I can't remember why I picked what I picked to do at University.
I sort of just fell into it; it seemed like the least worst option at the time, perhaps.
I'm pretty sure I could've just as easily fallen into something like medicine or law or marketing.

But instead, I'm here.
Swimming about in this accidental pool trying to find my way around.
Though - going back to my initial point - I think slowly I'm figuring it out.
I think I can finally start coming up with a real answer.