Once upon a time...

Welcome to Trials and Explorations - musings on daily life!

Following the completion of my project of documenting a year in the life of a law student living and studying in Antwerp, Belgium, I decided that a longer term project was in order, and so Trials and Explorations was born.

The aim? To document the meandering musings of a student as she ventures into the fourth and final year of her undergraduate degree and prepares to enter the "real world". Fear not, I may study law but I do occasionally muse on other topics - from art to ice-skating, from webcomics to philosophy, who knows where my musings will lead.

Today's musing...

As a 21 year old student nearing the end of my degree I am continually faced with the question of "what are you going to do next?" Everyone around me seems to have their whole lives planned out as solicitors or barristers, and though I'm sure they're not quite as together as they seem, and have their own doubts, it can sometimes feel as if I'm merely pretending to be a responsible adult and that at any moment the disguise will fall off.

Of course everyone experiences this type of self-doubt where time seems to run away from you at pivotal moments in their lives, but lately I keep turning around and realising that a case from 2004 is actually 8 years ago, and not the 2 or 3 it feels like. Then I turn around again and realise that I have lived on my own for 3 years, travelled to and around Peru, successfully completed a year's study abroad on a postgrad programme, and generally become an adult while I was busy looking elsewhere. Then I turn around again and get a little dizzy...

Time has a funny way of switching and changing constantly so you can wake up feeling mature and capable, revert to wondering how you got from being that little kid dreaming of being a princess or a train driver to being a student preparing to enter the workplace around lunchtime, and then spring back to being responsible and generally adult sometime around teatime.

In the immortal words of John Lennon, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." I think the only sensible answer to the question "What are you going to do next?" is this: "Figure it out." Make mistakes, learn from them, go on a journey where the destination isn't important and eventually I'll turn around again and find that I've dropped the disguise and really am an adult out there in the real world, hopefully doing something I enjoy.