"Life Plan". Hah.

You know how people want to know what career you’re going into? I hate that question. I’m 17. I don’t know what I’m doing for the next 50 years. All I know is that I have interests, and I have dreams. I’ll work with that as stuff comes my way. I guess. I don’t really know.

I’m good at words, and I’m good at connecting with people. I’m good at making them feel valued and worth it. I’m good at conversation. I’m good with communication period. I like to write, and words work with me. Words and people. Those are two things that I never grow tired of. Sometimes people piss me off. And sometimes words piss me off. And sometimes pissy people with pissy words piss me off. But in general, I like working with words and people. We’ll see how that turns out.

I want to go to college. Out-of-town. Who knows what I’ll major in. I don’t want an intense education, but I want a thorough education. I want a vivid education. I want new experiences, new ideas, new people and new places. I want my mind to grow, not just my GPA. I’d love to able to study in Europe somehow. But I’m poor and I’m not a genius. So who knows if that would work.

It’s probably easy to gather this, but I want to travel. I want to take a roadtrip around the United States, and a friend of mine and I are planning on doing that the summer of 2015. And I want to see Europe. All of it. London, Scotland, Austria, coffee shops in Paris, Italy, Spain. Every inch. And I also want to see the overcrowded Asian cities, for some reason. Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, that kind of thing. I think travelling would grow my mind. I love seeing new places, and I want to keep seeing them.

I want to get married sometime, of course. I really want to be a wife and mom. I want a career too. But I want kids, and I want to be married. I don’t want a lot of kids. No more than three or four. I only need a few, to have and to hold. I want sons. Little boys fascinate me. Little girls do too, but I love little boys’ minds. Maybe it’s because little brothers are all I’ve ever known. I know how to raise sons because I’ve helped raise several of my brothers. But to top it all off, I want a baby girl. I want to give her big brothers, and I want them to adore her (which probably wouldn’t happen, but it would be cute). I want the baby of my family to be a girl. And I pray she doesn’t put me through all the crap I’ve put my mother through.

I want children because I want to give hope to the next generation. It seems like there are two categories of parents. The parents who don’t care, and the parents who don’t let go. One buys their kids marijuana, and the other grounds them if they have a crush on somebody. I don’t want to be either parent. I want kids because I want to give someone hope. I want to give a person a solid foundation to run back to. I want to show them Christ. I want to be real with them. I want to be a source of wisdom and protection, but also a source of love and acceptance. I don’t want my kids to feel like they have to conform to my desired model for them. I want to give a person that kind of a start in life.

But I want to wait a few years before having kids. I want to be married to my husband for a little bit before adding more people to the mix. We’ll see if nature cooperates with me there.

And aside from all my dreams of travel and college and children and success, I simply want to fall in love. One day, I want to wake up next to the same man I married 70 years ago. I know the tingly-warm-fuzzies don’t last for 70 years. But I believe the intertwining of two souls does. I want to fall in love with someone’s soul. I want it to last. I don’t ever want to go through a divorce. I want to cherish and adore someone the way Christ cherishes and adores me. I want to explore the world together. I want to share my life with someone else. Experiencing everything together: the small things, like holding his hand under the covers at night. And then the big things, like graduating our oldest child. Heck, even having our first child. I want to be married to the man who will lead, serve, and protect our future family, and me. But I want to be married to a human, too. I don’t want a “perfect” guy, because they don’t exist and simply because I like humans. I want a man who has tasted pain and regret and brokenness, yet who has also tasted a vivid grace. Imperfection has something bittersweet about it. Imperfection hurts, and yet, if everything were perfect, would we have true love at all? After all, we would only be required to love someone in their perfection. There would never be any “I choose to love you, despite you”. I’m on a tangent here. But essentially, I want to fall in love. I feel like that dream is perhaps the most beautiful out of all my dreams. But I want it to be right. I don’t want to regret it. It is my most fragile dream. And yet it has such a potential to be so whole.

I’m not sure if I want to homeschool my kids. I don’t know yet. I have some time to figure that out. Homeschooling has given me some incredible opportunities, and being at a school all day would suck. I’d like to give my kids those same luxuries. I’m not sure about it, but we shall see.

I want to be accomplished, in some way. I don’t want to be President or anything. I just want to be successful. People have said I should go into politics. Heck no. Extemp has forever ruined politics for me. Who wants to observe corruption everyday, for a job? Like, no. I don’t know what I want to do. I have lots of things I like to do. I like acting. I like music and I like singing. I like words, and I like communicating. I like writing. I like people. I like connecting with them. I like little kids, and I want to help little kids from abusive situations. I like feeling successful and accomplished. I like the idea of journalism, either verbally or via writing. I like the idea of acting and singing and writing songs on the side. I like the idea of being a writer, helping celebrities write autobiographies, being a columnist, who knows. I like the idea of being a Victim’s Advocate for young children. I like the idea of being a psychologist. So I don’t know. There are all kinds of things I could do. We’ll see what doors open up.

My “life-plan” has more “I don’t know”s  and “I hope”s  and “we’ll see”s  than actual plans. But whatever. I don’t feel like it all has to be pieced together right now. We’ll see where everything ends up.