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Dear FutureMe, I've been doing a lot of thinking about my future recently, and I suppose I just wanted to share it with you. I just started my sophomore year of college, and I'm realizing I have no idea what I want to do with the rest of my life. I feel like I have millions of different versions of my life that I want to live and I don't know how I can possibly fit them into the precious few decades I have left. I've been in this constant battle of happiness vs satisfaction. Which should I be chasing? On the one hand, I want more than anything in the world to be happy. I want to wake up every day and be simply delighted to be alive. I want to smell the flowers, feel the sun on my skin, and hear the birds chirp. I want to have someone who loves me, and understand what true peace feels like. To travel, to eat, to laugh, to love, to learn, to share. I look around at my friends who make themselves miserable every day and I simply do not understand them. Why do they choose to live this way? They have every opportunity available to them, every resource at their fingertips, and yet they choose misery. Why waste your life like that - who benefits from it? Then again, they often make themselves miserable because they're chasing something that will satisfy them. I'm beginning to wonder what will ever satisfy me? Is it to be content - a life lived in a cottage near the mountains with fresh baked goods and a warm community? Is it to be a world changer - to live in a big city apartment with an important job and change lives? Is it to be a joybringer - capturing photos of the happiest moments of peoples lives or striving to make everyone else's life better? I have no idea. I like to say that I'll be happy wherever I end up. But I wonder if that's really true? I look at my mom and I know that she's unsatisfied with parts of her daily life. She doesn't like her job, she doesn't like her house, deep down I sometimes wonder if she likes her family. I feel like every role model in my life is unhappy in one way or another (and while I know that unhappiness is perhaps inevitable - I fear misery - but don't know how to avoid it). I just wonder what it's all for. In college there are so many things that bring me joy: my friends, my room, my free time, my dance, my victories. But I also put myself through classes and tasks I don't enjoy, some of them with no true point. Of course, there's a balance to everything. We can't understand happiness without experiencing sadness. We can't enjoy our relaxation if we aren't taking a break from something. It's funny, I was just about to write that I hope to spend more of my life in gratitude than in yearning. That to be yearning for something else would be a great fear of mine - but my realization that I no longer have a goal in life is what prompted this email in the first place. In conclusion: my god. I have no idea. Maybe we're all just imperfect, anxious little people. And maybe that's ok. I think there doesn't always have to be a point to it all - it will lead somewhere whether we want it to or not. Yours in inperfection, Me