One Thing I Wished I Knew When I Was 18

When I was 18 everybody told me I had to rush into life!

They told me I needed to get a degree immediately, find the love of my life, get married, buy a house, find my dream job and have kids “before it was too late”.

I ended up being so afraid and I thought I was constantly running out of time!

If I did not get it all then what would I do? What if I was too late? What if I missed out?

I did not even question whether there was another way to be happy, I just assumed there was no other possibility, or rather, that this was the only way to get true happiness.

And with that, I pressured myself so much that I never bothered to think whether I even wanted it at all!

I rushed into the life that I was told, hating every part of it, and constantly wondering when I would finally get to the point where I would be happy.

Only when it all fell apart, when I was so crushed with everything that went wrong that I could not bear it anymore, did I finally decide to ask myself the only questions that mattered:

Who am I? And what do I want?

Up until that point everything others told me was fine. But at that point, when I hit rock-bottom, I realized that all the struggling I had gone through…