it's not too late to make mistakes

read this first :D
What To Know When You're 25(ish)

 *image courtesy of RELEVANT Magazine (http://www.relevantmagazine.com)

i don't think we are ever encouraged to make mistakes. ever since we were young, we were strongly advised to excel in our studies or just be good at whatever we were doing at that time. failures were frowned upon, and shame on you if you ever decided to wallow on your mistakes for more than a day. there was hardly any room for errors. you fall down today, but you have to be back on track the next day.

i was the type of kid who was very conscious about her grades, who almost always submitted her homework on time, and who always made up for missed classes. i had a purpose and that was to be at the top of my class. given that i was surrounded by geniuses, i was aiming for ridiculously impossible dream. but even if i didn't manage to be at "the top", i was able to finish my studies with decently high marks.

but being out of the academe has pushed me out of my life track. i have always known that i will flourish in school, but out of it...i am no way nearer in figuring out what i'm really good at, and this is so "deja-vu-ic" because this was exactly how i felt when i had just graduated from college.

it's more than knowing what i'm good at. i'm at this point right now wherein i want to know what i'm really passionate about. i envy people of my age who had already found their calling. some of them may have high-paying jobs, while others barely earn enough to eke out a living. but they have a purpose, and they take the reins in shaping their destiny. may direksyon na sila sa buhay nila.

but i guess these people didn't just wake up one morning and had their life-altering decisions handed to them in a platter. they probably underwent a process of experimenting, discovering, traveling, and spending time to get to know themselves really well. they underwent a process of making several mistakes.

i didn't undergo the "process". i "experimented" but it was always on the safe side. i pushed my boundaries once when i decided to live on my own for a while. after that, i was always in my comfort zone, never daring to try some things out because i knew (or that was how i saw it) i would fail at them, or because they were way too risky or scary for me.

in other people's eyes, i have grown up a lot because i have a stable job, i can be entrusted in looking after their children (hahahahaha!), and i am on speaking terms with my parents again (don't hope much :D---it's a love-hate relationship, so tiffs are quite frequent). but in other aspects, i haven't grown up much after college. i still do things because they are safe or those are what have been expected of me, and in the process, i have been stuck at excelling in fulfilling other people's expectations but never really perceiving what my expectations should be.

i don't want to be stuck anymore. i want to explore and move forward. it's time for me to learn and grow. it's high time for me to start making mistakes.