Follow Your Heart

A few weeks ago, I made a gift for a very dear friend. It was a colorfully embroidered piece of denim that said “Follow Your Heart.” Luckily for me, she really enjoyed and appreciated it. I am following that piece of advice, and as much as I hope she does too, let me tell you all this: it’s freaking terrifying.

Following your heart isn’t always an easy thing to do. In less than a month, I will be graduating high school. A matter of weeks after that, I will be moving across the country to North Carolina. Once there, I will be studying Public Health with a concentration in pre-health professions at East Carolina University with the hopes of going on to medical school. From there, I hope to become either a pediatric or reconstructive plastic surgeon, or maybe something else entirely. There’s only thing I know for sure, and that’s that I want to go to medical school.

This is so scary to me because I’m the first one in my family to go to college right after high school, and the only to plan on going to graduate school. My father doesn’t have a degree and my mother obtained an associates degree later in life, so neither totally understand my struggles and fears. On top of making the transition to college, I also have to adjust to moving so far away from the midwest life I have always known. There are so many uncertainties surrounding these changes! What will this new place be like? How will I do in college? Will I make it into medical school? What happens if I don’t? How will I decide what to do with my life?

Ultimately, what comforts me is the fact that we all come to crossroads in our lives, we all have hard decisions to make, we all have tricky obstacles to overcome. What is important during such times is deciding what is best for ourselves. We have to ask ourselves: what is important to me? What do I want? How will this change my life? After understanding our options and making a decision, we must then make those uncertainties take a back seat in order to follow our hearts.

Despite my fears, I am following my heart, chasing my passions, and fulfilling my dreams by doing what I know is right for me. I am ready. I am choosing brave, and I know you are too 🙂