Heart Wishes vs. People’s Opinions

It always comes a time in our life where we have to choose between us and the world. Calm down, it’s easier than it appears. Have you ever noticed that there is always an aspect in our lives that we like more, but others think the opposite is better? For example, I love singing. But there’s always gonna be someone saying that I shouldn’t sing and instead focus on something else like painting. But I LOVE singing. So you just get frustrated and feel like screaming “How about you start enjoying my singing for gods sake?!” , but then you understand that there’s some sort of foundation to their opinion and it should be considered.

This is a mega moment of crisis in our lives and, I’ll tell you this, it SUCKS! We always say we don’t care about other peoples opinions, that we’re authentic… Until you find yourself in a dead end. And there’s always that doubt: “what if I’m wrong and everyone else is right?”

I have an example for you that happened when I had to choose my college courses (normally that’s the first time for everyone). I loved English, Business, Geography, Art… but what to do with so many talents?! That’s when I thought about doing Economics, Business & Geography. But everyone said that I should just do English literature and law or something along those lines. I’m not gonna lie I love both of the options that were given to me, but one of the options didn’t satisfy the others. At the end I decided that it was best for me to do English literature and law, but there was something inside of me saying this is not right. So on enrolment day I found out that I could still change courses so I dived in and straightaway I changed my courses to what I truthfully loved which was economics, business and geography.

In university, the crisis came back. I loved many things to do with business such as marketing, finance, HR… but everyone said that I should do languages. That would mean that in the future I will just be what?! The common teacher in a secondary school teaching languages to kids who are not even going to remember half of the words by the time they finish. I mean, I don’t have a problem with that, but I could see that they exaggerated that quality in me to know languages because they had more difficulty in knowing different languages than I did. At the end of the day I followed my heart and I decided to do International Business with Mandarin. I still did what I wanted and I considered the “others” opinions by deciding to learn another language.

Thinking about this whole story, I believe that neither option A or option B is right: it’s the secret option C. Because when thinking about it we know ourselves, but we don’t completely understand how others exaggerate our talents. Others, however, have a sharp perception, but they don’t fully understand the desires of our heart. When just following what we want can be childish; like throwing shots at water, doing exactly what others want can be another interpretation to saying no to our own happiness. Perhaps if we could understand our crisis, life would be much more simple. Peoples opinions, are in fact very important. So is our authenticity too! The only thing missing is a little bit of wisdom to make these two ingredients.

Look into your path, look into the path of others pointed you too. So now you’re in a farm, plant an apple tree and you will then see the right answer. Just kidding but hey, I wish there was an actual easy recipe for this type of situations… Either way I believe that the right answer is: stop seeing everything in black or white and start to see all of the different shades of grey (no, not the book, those of life itself).

Valerie x