What I regret.

I decided a long time ago that it's silly to regret. Unnecessary because every choice you make brings you to where you are right now. Until recently I haven't had trouble avoiding regret, but there is one thing that trips me up and has for the past year or so. It is one of the biggest things that has brought me to the place that I am in now.

Fall of 2006 marked an important time in my life. I started to question the direction of my life and everything around me. I wanted to take a step back and reassess where I was going, and feel like I was the one in control of this life I was living. I reached out to the people around me for advice. I felt like I was waking up every day directionless and confused. I wanted to take a break from college, to take a few months, just work and play music and not worry about school work, remember why I was in school in the first place.
However, when I asked the people whose opinions on the subject I valued the most - parents, grandparents, advisors, many adults I have known for awhile - they all discouraged me from taking time off school. They said I should keep working toward the goal of a degree. They filled my head with worries like, "What if i leave school and never finish my degree?" "How will I afford to go back to school if my parents stop supporting me?" "How will I succeed in the world if I don't have a degree?" "What if I become a bum by just sitting around playing music and enjoying myself for 6 months?" "How will I expect to get a job someday if I enjoy traveling and 'flying by the seat of my pants' so often?"

Even now as I write it, I feel a twinge of anger at those thoughts they introduced me to. Here are the people who are supposed to help lead me to myself and all they have for me is worry. I come to them telling them what I think I need and they make me doubt myself further. Which leads me down a more directionless path.
So I stay in school. I take less and less hours each semester. I kind of have a job. I kind of play music sometimes. I kind of work on my portfolio. I kind of graduate.
They are kind of proud of me for that. They give me gifts for kind of graduating and kind of completing something.
And the whole time I feel unfulfilled.

I find myself half-graduated, but with an incomplete in one area that just weighs me down more every day. This project I have to do, this town, this existential crisis I'm floating around in. I have all this graduation money. I want to use it to hit the road and get the hell out of dodge for awhile.
I tell my trusted advisors. They tell me how disappointed they would be if I followed my heart into that scenario. They want me to finish my degree for real. They want me to work toward the goal I've been in pursuit of for 5 years.
But what goal? I don't feel like I have a goal. Whose goal is this? Mine or theirs? Why do they need me to do this so badly RIGHT NOW? Why can't I do it on my own time and have them be accepting and encouraging of that? They didn't help me, they just pushed me when they should have listened. And now here I am.

BUt you know what? I really can't regret it. The reason that the people I need to have faith in me don't encourage me to follow my unconventional ideas is because I have never shown them what following my heart can do for me. And the reason I haven't followed my heart is because they have discouraged me on behalf of their potential disappointment. So something has to give in this negative feedback loop that I now find myself in.

So, trusted advisors - prepare to be disappointed in the near future.