I’m caught between believing people who tell my I’ll be able to figure it all out and people who tell me I need to look at and believe the cold, hard truth.

Although at this point in life I think neither is actually the right way. I think the world fits somewhere in between the two. I feel like you can enjoy the things you want to do even if you’re not super duper good at them and that hard work can go a long way, but if you’re not good enough and not honest to yourself about how good you are you’ll just end up doing yourself in. And we need to hear the truth, but I hate it when people do it coldly and harshly.

I honestly don’t know what I want to do with my life. I’ve heard a few times now that I should work backwards from my goal: figure out what I want to do, then trace backwards and find out what I need to learn to do it. The problem with this is that I know reasonably well what I’m good at and what I like doing, I just don’t know what I want to do.
The other crisis I’m currently going through is that I don’t know exactly how good I am at art for my age or for how long I’ve been invested in it and worked on it. Sometimes I feel like a million bucks and sometimes I feel like I’ll never be good enough. And while I definitely enjoy making art, I also feel attached to how good I perceive myself and my art to be. So I’m stuck here trying to figure it out.

I do know that I excel at languages and linguistics and I can always find a job in translation, I just don’t know if that’s right for me any more. Or if I want a job in academics. I’m just so lost right now.