Fear of the Unknown by Aviella

Fear of the Unknown by Aviella - December 2024 Scholarship Essay

I’ve always prided myself with my honesty. Ironically, the hardest thing in my life has often been to be honest with myself, and this has materialized in how I approach school and my career. When I was in high school I always felt like I knew exactly what it was I wanted to do with my life, and that was a pattern that had been frequently realized even in my elementary years. Security for me came from never allowing myself to be in a place of “not knowing,” even if that place where I “knew” that I wanted to be didn’t necessarily reflect what actually made me happy. Knowing what I wanted to do with life gave me purpose and it motivated me to work hard at school and my extracurriculars in order to give me the best chance of getting where I was going. The hardest academic challenge that I’ve ever had to face has been learning to live with not knowing what I want to do.
When my senior year hit I realized that for the first time in my life I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. The career that I had been so set on felt like an elaborate ruse that I had set for myself, knowing that I liked nothing about the actual career. For all the years in high school I had convinced myself that I wanted to be a doctor, I had only ever wanted the money that came with it.
When I finally admitted to myself that I didn’t actually want to be a doctor, I felt like I was shooting into the dark trying to find a new direction for my life. All of my years of “knowing” came to nothing when it came to the final line. The realization that I had lost my stability caused a lot of my grades to drop and damaged how I viewed myself and school. My senior year, I graduated with the worst GPA that I have ever created. My only plan at that point was to join the Army which I had sworn to join a month prior to graduation. Unfortunately, two weeks before I was supposed to leave, my contract fell through, once again leaving me directionless.
Without my contract, a limited budget, no plan, and an overall bitterness towards education I felt lost. All of my plans, the things that I was supposed to do, the things that I wanted to do, had fallen through. Finally, I made the decision to finish up my Associate’s degree at my local Community College. After a couple of months, the anger and bitterness that I had developed from the insecurity of not knowing started to fall to the wayside. As the negative feelings toward school melted, my love for learning came back, this time without the need for a motivator. My grades followed. I started to focus on the things I loved again, school especially. I started to be able to accept that I didn’t know what I wanted to do and come to peace with not knowing. I personally had to hit rock bottom in order to start allowing myself to love school again. Although not the most helpful technique for getting over challenging academic experiences, it ended up being the only thing that allowed me to get rid of all of my developed biases and start over. Through this process, I fortunately have started to gain more direction in my life. I’ve developed a strong love for writing and planning, and have begun to work my way towards a degree in business in order to eventually go into marketing management.
I still struggle with knowing all of the details of what I want my future to look like. Specifics are hard. However, one thing is for certain. Never again will I let myself or my academics crumble over a fear of the unknown, and never will I hold myself back because of the former.