One day I sat quietly and a rather unsettling thought hit me. When did my life turn into a checklist? School, then college, then a job, then earning money, then owning a house, then getting married, then having a family. Everything lined up neatly like a list I was supposed to tick off one by one. And I cannot remember the exact moment I ever agreed to that order.
Funny enough, my own life already broke that neat order early on. For me, college and work did not happen one after the other. They happened at the same time. I studied and worked at once, juggling lectures and a job in the same stretch of my life. So even the tidy sequence I thought everyone was supposed to follow was never really that tidy for me. Maybe that is part of what made me question the whole thing in the first place.
Since I was a kid, this order felt like it was planted in me without me noticing. After school comes college. After college comes a job. After a job people start asking when you will get married. After marriage they ask when you will have kids. As if life has one official track, and anyone who does not follow it is seen as falling behind or somehow broken.
What made me pause was this simple question. Did I actually choose all of this, or am I just following an order that was set by other people long before I was even born? I have been working through these points not because I sat down and decided them, but because that is just how it is supposed to be, they say.
I am not saying this order is wrong. Many people live it and are genuinely happy. School, work, marriage, family, these are beautiful things if they are what we truly want. The problem is not the content. The problem is when I go through it without ever asking whether this is really what I want, or just because I am afraid of being seen as different if I do not.
Because this checklist has a strange effect. It makes me measure my life by how many things I have ticked off, not by how meaningful it actually feels. I start to feel left behind when I see others already at the next point, even though that point may not even be one I want. I chase something not because I desire it, but because everyone my age has already gotten there.
And quietly, this checklist steals something too. It steals the possibility that my life could look different from that list. What if there are people who are happy without following the whole order? What if there is another path that never made it onto the list, but actually fits some people better? We rarely talk about it, because we are too busy making sure all the standard boxes are checked. Maybe doing college and work at the same time was my own small proof that the order can be rearranged, and life still goes on just fine.
Slowly I am trying to look at it again. It does not mean I reject the whole order, because some of it I genuinely want too. But I want to live it because I truly chose it, not just because I am following the current. I want to be able to stop at each point and ask, is this what I want, or is this just what is expected of me.
Maybe life was never meant to be a list that has to be completed in the same order by everyone. Maybe life is more like a blank page than a pre-printed checklist. And maybe the bravest thing I can do is not to tick off every box as fast as possible, but to dare to ask which boxes are truly mine, and which ones I merely inherited without ever choosing.
