This is how you should live your life. You should go to the gym. You should cook home made healthy meals every night. You should keep your house tidy and clean at all times. You should wake up before 7am everyday. You should find someone and get married. You should travel the world. You should read a lot. You should have lots of outdoorsy hobbies. You should have children. You should be a vegan. You should have faith. You should go to University. You should be skinny. You should have curves. You should be a traditional wife. You should be a high-flying career woman. You should live your life how someone else wants you to live it because it's how they want to live theirs.
There is nothing that annoys me more than someone telling me how I "should" live my life. There are only a few things that I believe I should do. I should do what makes me happy, I should look after the ones I care about and I should try to avoid harming anyone including myself.
Of course, I do have other beliefs on how I
want to live my life, but none of those things are things that I should do nor do I expect that others should do them, even though a lot of people may want the same things. I want to finish writing my book. I want to have clothes I love. I want to get back to reading as much as I did before uni. I want this blog to grow and be better. I want to be successful in
my own right.
Some people believe success is money, some believe this is a career, some a happy family, some writing a book, some becoming famous and some all of the above. Never let anyone tell you that your version of success is wrong. Unless, of course, your version of success is harmful to yourself or others as that is something I cannot advocate...
Going through with what you want to do can be very hard when you're a young adult. As your parents, your grandparents or other people of this age are most likely telling you what you should be doing. And whilst they do have life experience, this doesn't mean they know it all, this doesn't mean that they know what will make you happy.
I am lucky that my parents always told me to do what makes me happy, but still other pressures have gotten to me at times. When it was coming to the end of uni and I was constantly being asked what I was going to do with my Philosophy degree, I started telling people that I wanted to be a teacher and even applied to PGSE courses. Thankfully, with serious thought, I knew that teaching wasn't going to be for me and withdrew my application. I told people, whether they approved of my decision or not, that I was going to take a year out with no pressure and think about what I wanted to do. And that, having the belief that I need not conform to entering a career straight out of uni purely because I was told that is what I should do, was probably one of the best decisions I've made so far.
