You and I Can Never Be Empty Vessels
I was told I could be whoever I want to be. I can change the world if I wanted to. I can make all my dreams come true. A naive excitement enveloped my younger self who thought she could shape the world as she pleased. I booked my plane ticket to another part of the world to make my dreams come true and change the world for the better. I always wanted to make a good impact through some personal initiative. In my teenage years, I wanted to be a nutritionist so I could help people become more healthy, and then I wanted to be a neuroscientist so I could uncover the secrets of the mind and help people with their mental health, and then I wanted to be a politician so I could help society move through stubborn issues such as income inequality.
But how did I decide the dreams that I wanted to pursue? Answering this question isn’t simple, which perhaps is one reason why I am now doing a PhD in critical social psychology. Although I know I want to delve deep into how we become what we become, and how we think what we think, I am still not sure what I want to do with a PhD. So that’s where I am, a PhD student. I don’t have any tangible or specific goal of where that should lead to yet, even though I continue to feel the pressure of needing certainty; that being unsure of where you want to go isn’t a good sign. But why is that? I think I made some progress in transcending the linearity of my…
