It’s a short semester, all the teachers warn.

            Yet in the midst of trying to read four novels in two weeks, working for three different group projects, and getting buried under an ever-growing mound of readings, I find myself face-to-face with the one question that every senior dreads asking.

            What is the purpose of my life?

            Such a cliché question that I know I’ll always face at different points in my life, but it’s one that has been nagging me for the past months. With graduation looming, life is about to change yet again. Gone is the security of knowing that there’s another school year ahead, another year of learning new things and forming deeper relationships with friends. After March, it’s goodbye school, forever.

            What’s left in its place is a certain void that I’m unsure of how to fill. The freedom that I have to determine my life’s path is so daunting. It makes me want to stop in the middle of this road and try to assess what’s waiting for me in the paths ahead. But no matter how I try to see further beyond, there is absolutely nothing in the horizon that will clue me in on the things to come.

            So where do I try to find the answers? I’ve tried looking within, and have realized that I’m more messed up than I’m willing to accept. The confusion, the insecurity, and the general fear of the unknown all stop me from making sense out of anything. An inward quest just doesn’t seem to yield any of the answers I need.

            I’ve also tried reading The Purpose Driven Life, just like everyone else has done by now, yet I feel like a dog chasing its own tail. If God made me for a purpose, and I’m supposed to develop a relationship with Him to find that purpose, that means that there is a purpose out there that I must find. Something that I can humanly deduce out of my relationship with Him, something that I interpret He must want me to do. But how am I supposed to know that that is really it, that whatever I find myself doing is truly the purpose for which I was made? In short, how am I supposed to know what I’m looking for, and how do I know I’ve found it? Sartre and Nietzche are starting to make more sense in saying that such a search is futile, and that I should just make my own meaning, pursue my own path. But even then, how am I supposed to know what path I want, when there is an infinite number of paths I could take?

            That is just one among the many contradictions that I’ve been forced to grapple with in college. There’s also “How do I strive for Magis, for the More, without burning myself out and spreading myself too thin?” and “How do I become a woman for others if I don’t even know who I am?” It’s like that line, “You can’t love someone fully without first loving yourself?”

            Essentially, the search for my life’s purpose is really a search for an identity, a hope to find a clearer picture of who I am and what I’m supposed to be.

            It was so much easier when I was younger, when I could dream of anything I wanted and feel safe in knowing that I could always change my mind as I got older. Time and age has robbed me of that luxury: suddenly, I’m at that point where I should more or less decide. If I still keep changing my mind and flit from one job to another, nobody sees it as idealism anymore: it becomes fickle-minded and stupid.

            I had always wished that I could be a grown-up and earn my own money so that I could eventually start a family. Ironically, I now sometimes wish that that moment had never arrived.

            Now I have no choice but to face life’s more difficult questions: who am I, and what is my life’s purpose?

            The answers I find will make all the difference in the world.