Without a Map

For Christmas one year, I asked for a pair of ice skates.

I had recently watched the Olympics and desperately wanted to be a figure skater. I wanted to be one so bad, that I would march down to a frozen patch of ice below my house and attempt to skate around on the layer of snow. So bad, that I would even skate up and down the road in front of my house when the snow would get packed down. I imagined myself doing double sow cows and triple lutzes with the likes of Kristi Yamaguchi.

Then there was the time, after watching a marathon of Cops with my family, that I wanted to be one myself. There seemed to be a bit of a discrepancy--there certainly wasn't a lot of female cops on Cops. Oh well, that didn't matter. I wanted to be a cop.

A few years later, I found myself drawn back to the Olympics, only this time I wanted to be a gymnast. I was green with envy over their back flips, their perfect splits and their sticky landings. I wanted to be one so bad that we even had a neighborhood Olympics with my best friends, complete with gold crayon-colored paper metals.

Then came the time when I actually had to decide what I wanted to do with myself. I remember clicking my way through the seemingly endless career tests. One said I needed to be a vet, another said that would do better in fields that involved the public. Yet, even after these "fortune telling" tests, I still didn't know.

I was always envious of the kids in school who knew exactly what they wanted to do with their college degree. I always seemed to get caught up in other things and so distracted. What was college, again?

I remember very clearly the night I decided that I wasn't going to USU anymore, but that I would try going to BYU-Idaho for a little while. I sat on the lone chair against the far wall in our living room, while my family hovered around giving advice. Cold, hard, reality-filled advice.

The simple truth was that I couldn't continue going to school at USU. I didn't have enough credits to be a resident of Utah and I couldn't pay their ridiculous asking price for out-of-state tuition.

"Just try BYU-Idaho for a little while. If you don't like it, you can always come back," my sister said.

So that was it. I was going to Rexburg.

After about 4 months, something kept pulling me back to Logan. For some reason or another, I just didn't feel like I should keep living in Rexburg. I got offered a transfer scholarship to come back to USU that I gladly accepted. Since I had gone to Rexburg and got decent grades, I guess that USU decided they would let me come back to their school for a reasonable price. Deciding to go to BYU-I helped me get back to Logan.

A few months later, I met Mark.

There have been so many times where I have been so lost, I would wish that someone would just tell me what to do. I would look at adults that I knew and think, "How did they get to where they are?" I'm so glad that my life doesn't have a map. All of my choices, seemingly small at the time, have slowly guided me to the direction where I am now. Now that I look back, my trail has been perfectly paved. I don't know where I'm going next or what decision I'm going to make tomorrow, but I can't wait to see where it's going to take me.