I am 21 and I feel lost in life

My mom has always told me that I was a very curious child and that books became my favorite toys before I could even read.

I don’t know if it was the school system, the family situation, or both, but by the time I got into high school, my curiosity was almost completely replaced by diligence.

Yes, I was that kid who had all the homework sorted and was always the teacher’s favorite. And yet I barely favored my own interests. I don’t actually remember having any. Free time has always been stressful and boring, so I rather tried to stay busy.

Up until staying busy stopped working.

After many years of abusing my brain and my body with the workload that they were never meant to manage, 6 months ago I found myself studying in the final year of a program I didn’t like, getting sick every 2 weeks, and feeling miserable about it.

That’s when I realized it was time for me to seriously slow down. It was the time when I decided to leave university.

I will forever be grateful to my scared, confused 20-year-old self for finding her courage to make such a difficult and important decision to protect her health. She really did it.

Shortly after that my soulmate and I got married and we have made this crazy decision to sell out all our possessions that we have acquired by that point and become digital nomads. We decided to travel the world.

Around that time I also started making YouTube videos, which I wanted to try for years but never had the confidence to do so.

At that point, something in me really said “screw it, let’s give it a go”.

So I did.

And ever since I have been filming different things on my journey. I filmed videos about my daily life, my interests, some thoughts that I had on my mind. And honestly, I loved it. I loved creating all these videos. I even got 2.5 k views on one of them.

And yet, something felt very off about my journey on YouTube.

Now I understand that this confusion around my channel was no more and no less than the reflection of how I felt about my life in general. And I felt confused. I still do.

It has been 9 months of me being not enrolled anywhere for studies or a job without a set goal in mind.

And at this point, it is highly uncomfortable. In a sense it was much easier to have this sense of immediate purpose by completing assignments in school, worrying about exams, and hoping that everything will get clearer later by itself.

And now I am utterly faced with the idea that my life is in my hands and whatever happens to me today and tomorrow is defined by my choices and by my choices only.

Let me tell you, it is not easy to accept that.

I guess I have some sort of postgraduation crisis but without actually graduating.

I am 21 and I don’t know what to do with my life. I don’t understand what I like. I don’t know how to earn money. But I want to figure it out

I am sure that there are people out there who feel the same way as I do. And eventually, these are the people I am reaching for.

It is interesting where this journey of me trying to find my place in life, traveling through time and space on a big elliptical rock will eventually lead me.

All I know is — I am doing the best I can. And if you somehow can relate to the way how I feel, I am sure that you do your best too. It is just that sometimes the best we can do is not much.

I am on my way to get unlost. And I guess the whole point of this essay is, let’s get unlost together.

Thank you for reading!

You can also watch the visual version of this essay on my YouTube channel.