Ever since I started traveling, I have had dozens of people make comments to me about “growing up” or needing to prepare for the “real world.”
I have spent my teenage years traveling the world and experiencing everything it has to offer. From the moment I turned 16 and could drive, I began traveling. It started as small day trips to nearby towns and slowly turned into massive road trips by myself.
I always knew I wanted traveling to be a part of my life, but it slowly began to occur to me that there was too much out there for me to see just a small part.
I turned to the idea of travel journalism and then started experimenting with options that would make travel my full-time job — content creating, flight attending, even cruise ship work. Anything that would allow me to see the world and learn new cultures.
As I would express these ideas to other people, I would be met with a lot of judgement. They would tell me I need to get a real job or that I need to stop trying to escape the real world.
I had a friend who asked me, “What will you do when you are 30?” and to this day I can’t understand that question.
[Related: OPINION: Don't let society convince you that college is the only path]
For me, traveling is more the real world than anything else. I find my passion in new experiences and taking risks. I am happiest when I am meeting new people and talking for hours about our lives even though the next morning, we may never see each other again. I get excited listening to people speak different languages and I get an adrenaline rush from attempting to order in their language.
I hope that those feelings never go away, and I really hope that passion isn’t gone just because I turn 30, or 40 or 50.
Right now is when we are supposed to be learning who we are and what makes us the happiest. I have found myself more in my month of backpacking Europe than I ever have anywhere else.
People’s judgement of my life used to make me insecure. I would doubt if what I was doing was the right choice. It made me feel like my goals and desires for the future were an unrealistic fantasy that I would one day have to wake up from.
It took me until very recently to realize that my life is what I choose and so is yours. There are people who want to work a nine to five job and give their life to corporate America. There are others who do it because they feel like it’s what they are supposed to.
I, however, refuse to ever do that. I may not know exactly what my life will look like in 10 years, but for me, that’s the beauty of it. I get to figure out who I am and what I want as I go. Every day is a new adventure.
[Related: COLUMN: Summer Blues: Rethink the way you spend your money]
At the end of the day, you get to choose the path you take in life. Other people don’t get a say in what you want to be.
Who cares if everyone says your dreams are unrealistic? Make it your goal to prove them wrong. Right now is the time to make mistakes. There is no better time to figure out who you are. Take risks, go against the status quo if you so desire. If you are happy, nobody else's opinion matters.
Gentry Keener (she/her) is a junior studying journalism and political science.
