By Agnes Dorling, Third Year, English
“So, what are your plans for next year?”
A question to make your throat dry up and mouth hang open helplessly in the absence of a satisfactory answer springing forth from it to quell expectations and release you from the awkwardness of this conversation.
I usually just answer with a meek, “I haven’t really worked that out yet.” and that tends to do the job of ending any further inquiries. When I did once provide a more concrete and actionable answer to that question, asked by a friend of a friend at Cori Tap (I won’t pretend that the conversation was free-flowing), that I’d probably just work at a local pub I work at during university holidays to make some money and figure out what I actually want to do, he gave me the helpful and solicited advice to “be more ambitious” (granted he also complained about his meagre salary of 60k on a placement year and told me, in all sincerity, that he’d fear he’d have to wear a bulletproof vest if he ever visited my local area, the dark depths of Stoke Newington).
Recently, I’ve often found myself thinking about the famous Sylvia Plath fig tree quote from her novel The Bell Jar, where her protagonist imagines figs of opportunity shrivelling up and dying before her eyes due to her indecision and inability to pick just one of them (a comforting thought, I know). On the other hand, I’m also frequently imagining my older self, in her 40s or 50s, looking back at her younger, more foolish self needlessly worrying about her life slipping away from her at the ripe old age of 22, and gently reproaching her for her inappropriate sense of scale, her needless anxiety over things she had seemingly endless amounts of: time to think and mistakes to make. Studying at a place like Bristol (or probably any university, I have no special knowledge to assume Bristol is exceptional in this case), where your peers are seemingly all applying for grad schemes or landing cushy internships, the hiring processes of which you’re unsure are strictly honourable and upright - “There’s GOT to be an uncle or something, surely? I swear that stuff’s not allowed to happen anymore??” - can make you feel a little insecure about your own future prospects in comparison.
However, I’d put money on those feelings of insecurity being a pretty universal experience for people at this juncture of their lives, with a wide expanse of uncertainty staring back at them. As much as being told what to do can feel stifling and annoying, once that sense of a clear marked-out pathway is taken from us, we may find ourselves wishing to crawl back into the comfort of deadlines and exams.
Most of us do quite like being told what to do, even if we only realise it once the telling stops. Freedom is inhibiting. It’s a strange and irritating fact of life. What do we do with it? How do we know if we’re making the right choice? How can we possibly know what we want to do if we’ve never done any of it before? Surely we should get to do it all before we decide which of it we’re actually going to do in a proper, committal, real-life way?
Unfortunately, that’s not how life works for most of us, and we do have to make choices, narrow things down a little bit, if only for our mental well-being, to keep our figs nice and juicy some might say. These choices don’t have to be final though. There will always be someone older than you, someone who’s changed their mind more times, who’s “failed” at things more often, and aren’t they the most interesting people? Those who haven’t etched out an assured directory for their life, who haven’t assigned and thus condemned themselves to a singular role or identity which they will enact for the rest of their lives.
As Oscar Wilde once said,
“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment.”
and I for one would like to delay that punishment for as long as possible.
This is all to say that, if you missed the deadline for that thing you were meant to do before Christmas, or didn’t bother to apply in the first place, or have absolutely no idea what you want to do for the rest of your life, the world won’t end, and there’s always next year, or the one after that, or the one after that one as well- probably.