follow my heart, you say

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary“. ~Steve Jobs

Everybody wants me to follow my heart.

But don’t you get it?? I’ve spent so long following other people’s wishes and expectations for me, that I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what my heart wants. Or when I think of something that I think I might want, (like maybe just get a business or accounting degree, and become a secretary until I get married and then be a homemaker/housewife) a little nagging, disdainful voice in the back of my head says “You’ll never make any money doing that!” or “You’re capable of more than just that! You could do so much better!”

My parents have always told me, from the time that I was very young, that I could be anything I wanted to be, do anything I wanted to do, go anywhere I wanted to go. Anything! Anything at all!! The world could be mine, they said. I was smart enough and talented enough to have my pick. All the time they would say this, my father especially. And when I was in high school, going through my “I wanna be a teacher” phase, he’d say it. “I’m going to be a high school math teacher,” I’d say. “Just don’t forget,” he’d reply, “you can do anything you want to if you set your mind to it.” Always with the emphasis on anything. As if he meant to imply “Anything but a teacher of course.” It got to the point where I actually started to think, Ok, maybe being a teacher isn’t good enough. Maybe I have to pick something bigger and better. Maybe I have to pick something that will make people go ‘wow!’ Because I could be anything! Why settle for something like *mentally wrinkles nose* a teacher? Eventually nothing became good enough. Lawyer? Pah! Doctor? As if!! None of these things got the ‘wow’ reaction I craved. But to be perfectly honest, I probably could have been happy as a teacher. Not now though. Now I can’t because I’ve already been jaded against it. And because of my horrendously failed attempt at engineering, I’ve been jaded against anything math, science, or technology related (although, when I think about it, really I’ve always been more humanities-minded than science-minded).

Follow my heart?
My heart has been pushed and pulled in so many different directions that it’s just as confused as my head.

Follow my heart?
Easier said than done.