Dichos, ponderings & a few vultures (for good measure)

Today has been a wild day. I've gone through a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions, and I haven't actually physically done much at all. I guess I'll start from the beginning...

I woke up kind of late because my grandma had company over and I couldn't sleep. We talked for a bit and after they left at 11pm, I kept my grandma company while she cleaned the kitchen. It was almost midnight by the time we finally got to crawl into bed.

But I slept amazingly, the first time I didn't have any dreams in a long time. And aside from the occasional kick in the face from Liam, I wasn't disturbed. So I woke up at 9am. It would have been later but my grandma was making pancakes and I didn't want to miss them... and that's just me waking up.

After breakfast I wrote for a bit, watched some inspiring videos to put me in a good mood (the kind that I don't have time to watch in Chicago that give me all the feels), and also had my sister take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. She was something along the lines of an ENTJ, which described her pretty accurately.

And I decided to look more at my Type just to know more about myself. I'm an INFP and I identify pretty strongly with most of the traits that are typical of one. Now I've always known that people like me, sensitive and creative, like to go into careers such as writers or social workers, but I've kind of avoided the thought.

Because I want to be an engineer. I mean, I joined robotics sophomore year and decided that I wanted to build things that make people's lives better. People would ask me what I wanted to study, what I wanted to be, and I could answer confidently "an engineer of some type, I don't know exactly what kind just yet." And I was happy. And people were happy.

And taking bio this past year, I started leaning more towards biomedical or biomechanical engineering. Thinking, "This is it: the best of both worlds. Bio and engineering, creating and people..." If only I could convince myself to stop right at that.

The problem with having a lot of time alone is that you think. And you start to doubt. And the thing is, I've had a lot of that lately. I've gone through these phases before, where I doubt all that I have come to know about my future self. Ask my best friend. She's heard every "epiphany" I've had this past school year regarding what I want to do. From epigenetics to pharmaceuticals, neurology to even writing, I'm no stranger to this type of freak out.

But rarely were they much of a problem. Like I said, I'd settle down and after maybe half a day I'd always come back to some type of engineering, happy to return to normalcy. But sometimes it would blow up. Physics was all kinds of stressful and when I got particularly caught up in it, doubt on my ability to become a decent engineer would resurface.

This past February I had a huge meltdown. The kind of meltdown that you remember for your entire life because it changes who you are. Physics wasn't working. I knew the concepts and felt I had a good grasp on them, it just took me a long time and sometimes approaches to problems and applications of concepts that were intuitive to others weren't so obvious to me. So I started dropping the engineering act or facade or whatever I had, and really looked into what I wanted.

I started thinking about why I wanted to be an engineer. And I got to the point where I realized, with help from friends, that what I really wanted to do was help people. And engineering was an easy answer just because it combined two things I loved: technology and people. But I understood that I wouldn't be helping people if I wasn't a good engineer. They say you don't need to be good at physics or even like it to become an engineer, but you do need to at least be able to tolerate it and accept that you'll be using it.

And so I walked away that day thinking bio was probably my best bet. I didn't want to leave science and all the innovation that surrounds it, but engineering wasn't exactly meeting enough of my personal need to help people. And while I knew I had the potential to go into something more "fit" for my type, I didn't want to. As my friend said, "There needs to be more people going into science for the right reasons." And I think I have the right reasons. I mean, I want to solve problems and help people. I don't know how or what, Alzheimer's is always in the back of my mind, but I felt better about that.

But I couldn't keep my mind from wandering back to engineering. It was the inevitable ending I just kept coming back to.

Last night when my grandmother's friends came over, one of them told us a dicho, a saying, that her husband told their kids. Translated, it's "Never go to sleep without having accomplished something that day, and never get out of bed without a plan for what to do next."

That's the style of living over here. Living day-to-day, sometimes on a ranch, or maybe in a small shop, but it's... simpler. And while it may seem hard to relate that to the hustle-and-bustle life that I know back in the States, the idea's the same. Do stuff, and have a plan to do more stuff. But the truth is, I still find myself getting lost in this struggle of what my "stuff" is.

And reading those MBTI career paths, I came upon one INFP who was an engineer and decided to become a lawyer because their previous occupation didn't satisfy their need to help people as much as they thought it would. And I took it as a sign, that I need to start another mental breakdown, and try finding what I really wanted to do in life. So I had it. A long thought. And I just sat there after my pancakes, thinking. Until 2:20pm. I took a shower some time in that time, but I still don't know.

At 2:20pm I went on an adventure with my grandma's friend and my family. We spent time by the lake and ate cucumbers with lime and salt and chile pepper. There were vultures circling, a lot of them. After the lake we went back into town for a coffee and cake. It was a good escape, but I'm still kind of lost.

Trying to describe this feeling is hard. I mean, I identified as being an aspiring engineer for so long, it's just hard to let go of it. And maybe that's the problem I have. Letting go of that image of myself that I anchored my life around is... hard. Trying to find out what I want to and should do for the rest of my life is... hard. Life is... hard.

And maybe I just need to suck it up. Maybe I can never have the "best of both worlds." But one thing is for sure: I'm either too immature or naive or too something to stop trying to find it. I know more mental breakdowns are in my future, but I just need to kind of roll with life for now and let it play out. There are worse things in life than not knowing what to do in college. The vultures can keep circling.