As graduation looms ever closer (11 D A Y S) I’ve been thinking more about my goals for post-grad. I have some great aspirational goals like fluency in French (25% so far!), traveling to at least one country not on this continent in the next five years, and (finally) learning to drive. I also have some financial goals like paying back my student loans as quickly as possible (very reasonable, I’m lucky to not have a ton of debt) and building myself a safety net/emergency fund (I’m about 1/3 of the way there already, yay). And finally, a somewhat cheesy personal goal: I want to finally meet my measure of adulthood, pet ownership. Yeah yeah, I know adulthood is such an objective and arbitrary standard. And what even really qualifies me to be an adult? I don’t quite know anymore, but a long-time dream of mine is to be the loving person of a French bulldog. I love dogs and I want to be a responsible owner, which means I am waiting until I have the time, money, and environment needed to make sure my dream dog will be well cared for.
The one thing all these goals have in common, besides being actually realistic, is that I am actively taking steps towards achieving them. Even if I’ve only done so by making a list of things I need to do to get closer to that goal (take passport photos, get passport, research destinations, find cheap airfare), I am always taking steps to actually accomplish the things I want to do. Because that’s the thing about goals; they’re pointless if all they become is a list of quickly forgotten New Year’s resolutions. If you have dreams, chase them! Don’t just wish for all the amazing things you want in life, work towards them. Maybe that means spending thirty minutes every day practicing conjugations, maybe that means emailing seventeen job listings every week, maybe that even means living like a college student two years into the ‘real world’ so that you can pay off your student loans in less than ten years. Then you can travel without guilt about the debts you could be paying off instead.
Honestly though, having goals isn’t some shtick so I can be better-than-thou, I do this to stay sane. I’m moving towards specific, realistic, tangible goals so that I don’t feel like I’m stagnating. I focus on my goals like milestones on the horizon. They are my point of reference that let me know I’m actually moving forward. My greatest fear is getting stuck in a rut and never getting out of it. Like that infuriating level of some video game that you can never beat and so you get trapped, unable to move on. That’s my nightmare in the game of life. A dead end job. Insurmountable debt. Failure. Those are things that keep me up at night, and straight up scare the shit out of me. So I make lists. I scratch things off and know that I’m making progress. I have my dreams to beat back the nightmares. And I follow them to outrun the fear. Don’t let your dreams slip away. Don’t let the fear win. Figure out what you want and go for it because, to quote Post 62:
“If not now, when?”
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