I Let Other People Tell Me What To Do With My Life
By: Rebeca Ansar
Tags: Life Lessons, Blog, Advice, Self, Personal Development

A few years ago, I was a freshly minted undergraduate with all of the classical uncertainty that follows. When it came to building my career, I had no compass, no understanding of the sky or the ground.

Until that point, I had spent my life achieving goals set forth for me by others. Insidiously, I learned that my goals needed someone else’s stamp of approval.

You could say that I was easily convinced to pursue medicine. Shortly after graduating, I joined a post-baccalaureate program to fulfill my upper-division medical science courses. In order to get into top medical schools, I would need to excel in these courses. The pressure was on.

I was so miserable.

I knew that becoming a doctor would likely guarantee financial success and status in society, but I just couldn’t find happiness in the pursuit of that life. When I was working toward that goal, I saw each day as the act of handing over more of my precious moments toward something ever-demanding that didn’t even seem like it was mine.

Even back then, I knew that writing was my passion, but I had grown up in a Desi, or South Asian, community.

Desis didn’t become writers.

Desis didn’t become artists.

Desis became your doctors and your lawyers and your engineers.

They entered professions with guaranteed usefulness to society, and the idea of what “useful” meant was seemingly set in stone. Still, being a girl with parents who took an active interest in her education made me privileged.

My parents “let” me have an education. I could have just been allowed one future option. That of a wife.

I considered myself lucky.

So, I sprinted along a pre-determined path without taking into serious consideration what it was doing to my physical and mental health.

My body was under stress all of the time. I teetered on the verge of collapse from mental and physical exhaustion. Eventually, I arrived at such a state of dilapidation that walking a block exhausted me.

I was working a demanding full-time job while taking a full course load. Somewhere in my mind, I must have had the twisted logic: the sooner I can get through this, the sooner I can get out of it.

I was pushing myself too hard, giving myself too may deadlines, because even in the best-case scenario, I wasn’t going to make any real money until I was in my mid-thirties.

And all for what? To spend more of my time doing things that I didn’t want to do?

These days, I work on building my self-acceptance and internalizing my locus of control. It keeps my voice the loudest in my mind.

I stole time for self-reflection, even when I didn’t know I was doing that.

During the evenings when I didn’t have a three-hour class to attend, I would drive up the snaking hillside in North Berkeley until I reached the Lawrence Berkeley Hall of Science. I’d park my car in the secluded parking lot and gaze down at the cities below.

This spot became my place in the small city.

It was only known to a handful of people. I absolutely loved it. On evenings when I was a little braver, I would carefully step off of the parking lot and onto the grassy top of a giant hill. A sturdy cement block, big enough to sit cross-legged on, protruded from the side of this hill.

Life shouldn’t be lived small. It also shouldn’t be lived to garner someone else’s approval.

When I stood on it, I felt two things.

One was the magnificent rare air available at a great height. The other was a twinge of fear, a reminder of my mortality.

From that vantage point, I could see the calm streets of Berkeley, the majestic pier of Oakland, and my glistening goal of San Francisco across the aegean waters of the bay.

The city shined in its bustle. Lives glimmered as cars and bridges, restaurants and houses, were far enough twinkle like stars.

There, I heard the peaceful melody of a different life. One that was my own.

Elongated unhappiness eventually put my life in tremendous disarray.

I wasn’t living my life for me, and the pointlessness of that endeavor had finally floored me. It wasn’t easy to change gears, especially when I had done so much work in the pursuit of becoming a doctor, but I knew my fulfillment would be found on a different path.

I made that decision about five years ago. Since then, my resolve in a few tenets has strengthened.

Life shouldn’t be lived small. It also shouldn’t be lived to garner someone else’s approval.

What would it matter if my parents got bragging rights in front of nosy, frivolous acquaintances about their daughter’s medical degree if I lived a life that made me miserable?

These days, I work on building my self-acceptance and internalizing my locus of control. It keeps my voice the loudest in my mind.

There are still challenges.

Pursuing a new life with different goals didn’t mean that everything suddenly became easy. No, there were lots of false starts and twisted roads, but I know that these experiences helped me get to know myself and my road better.

One of the biggest life lessons I learned through this entire experience is that if the process feels wrong, the path isn’t for me.

Our careers and relationships are not destinations. They are the journeys we set upon, and we should derive fulfillment from being on the road.

I only wish I had learned how to care less about what others thought and more about what I wanted earlier. But hey, at least I found the best bird’s eye view in Berkeley along the way.