I find myself, frequently, comparing myself, my achievements thus far and my goals to others. Perhaps this is normal, I'm not entirely sure, but it's what I do. And often this becomes...my downfall perhaps. I stress, I panic, I worry that not knowing what I want to do with my life is a bad thing, I frequently change my mind and all of this has started to weigh me down.

I sat with a friend before a lecture was about to begin and said to him that I was close to giving it all in for a year and trying to find my feet, to travel and experience the world. The surprise was evident in his face, 'But you're so close to finishing.'
'I know. But I can't do this anymore. I feel like the pressure's all too much at this point in my life. Too much is going on in life.'
The lecture began and the conversation continued after it in a spur of the moment decision to go to the pub.
'The thing is, if I finish this year I'll want to do fourth year, and I can't take a break between the two.'
He frowned, dumping his bag on the floor near a bar stool and sizing up the pool table. 'Well, you can. I just don't think they recommend it.'
We both went quiet. The stress was getting to me and I wished I could be as confident and as sure as the man that was currently leaning over a pool table focusing on the little white ball. A week previously I had been so sure of what I wanted to do, now I was on the knife's edge, feeling like if I didn't have time out from Uni the next Semester would break me.

You know how when you've got something on your mind nothing will shift it, I spent the entire drive home musing over this, and several hours after I got home. Then it occured to me. The revelation was that the man I'd spent an hour playing pool with was 24, into his second degree and more street smart than I could be at this point in my life. I realised that I was only freaking 20 and that the people I compare myself to are at least 2 years older than me, often 5 or more, that some of them, like he was, are going through second degrees or took a year or so off after school or any number of other things. I realised that maybe it's OK to not know what my life will hold.

At Chris' graduation recently there was a guest speaker who had started off his life as a Civil Engineer, got bored of that and still wasn't sure what he was doing a PhD later and after many occupations. As he said, the end of your degree is not the end, it's the beginning, the start of a journey, and that most of the graduates in that room would probably end up in a job that hadn't even been invented yet.

Somehow that made me feel better.