A Letter to High School Seniors

I have been in your shoes before. You are about to graduate high school and step foot into the real world. Maybe you know exactly what you want to do, maybe you have no idea. If you don’t know, you are probably panicking and feeling lost. You are in the stage of life where you are trying to find yourself and who you can become. 

What you can be thankful for is that being homeschooled provided you time, hopefully, to follow passions that you would not have been able to in a public school setting. Maybe you have found your groove when it comes to hobbies and different jobs that you do and don’t enjoy. This is useful information when trying to figure out a career path. 

All throughout my high school career I was bent on going into politics. I was heavily involved with Turning Point USA and local political groups. I wanted to become a political journalist, and I did not want to go to college. I decided that I wanted to take a gap year. I was going to see if I could work my way up to becoming a political journalist instead of going into college. I do not believe that college is for everyone. I also don’t think that you have to have a college degree for every job. 

Then towards the end of my senior year, I took a job as a personal assistant. I did it for the entire summer. I learned a lot about myself. The kind of work that I love to do and what I hate doing. That is when I realized that I could not become a journalist. I despise sitting in front of a computer all day. I knew a basic desk job was not for me. After I came to this realization, I was extremely lost with career options. 

I ended up quitting the personal assistant job. At this point in my life, I had been going through some health issues for about two years. I have been on an extremely strict diet and gut reset to heal my immune system. I have gained tons of knowledge and experience from it. I decided that I would spend my time building a blog where I could talk about my health issues and share my story. I built a new passion from the pain I had been going through. This led me to decide that I wanted to study nutrition at a college. 

If you are feeling lost, not knowing where life is going to take you, I highly recommend apply for different jobs and seeing what you love or hate doing. Most importantly, follow your passion. You are on your own timeline. If you do not want to follow the path everyone has laid out for fresh graduates, do not. I took an entire semester off to see what I wanted to do, despite popular opinion. Now, I am in college, which is not where I expected to be at all. 

The thing is, not everyone is going to be supportive. I remember when I announced that I was not going to college immediately after high school. I saw the panic on everyone’s faces. I was told that I absolutely needed college and that it is too risky to go out into the workforce without a college degree. If you do not take risks in life, you do not grow. According to some, I took a risk by taking a gap semester. In reality, it was the best decision I ever made. My mom is even glad I did it. If I had not done that I would have never been featured in the New York Times or the Daily Wire to talk about my health issues and crunchy lifestyle. I probably would have never started this magazine with Joni.

Am I telling you to graduate and take a gap semester? Not exactly. I am telling you to take your time and all the opportunities given to you. Create something that contributes to the world. Use your time wisely and don't loaf around! Proverbs 3:5–6

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.”