Dear Everyone Who Is Trying To Figure Out What They Want To Be When They Grow Up,

    So I just watched The Martian with my younger brother and not only was that movie intense, it made me cry. Movies don't usually make me cry. And when I was younger I would pretend to cry during movies to fit in with my girlfriends, who were bawling their eyes out because the girl and the guy broke up in every, romance, movie, ever created on the planet. But this movie had one scene, that really got me considering the current mountian I'm climbing.
    I've been a ballet dancer for my entire, eighteen year old life. But because of reasons that I'll end up blogging about later, I recently quit ballet. And that kinda changed a lot of things for me. The big, screaming change being, what am I going to do with my life now? I was well on my way to being hired as a professional ballet dancer. I was coming home from the best ballet school in the world, preparing to compete in a world wide ballet competition, in hopes of earning a place within the top 20 eighteen year olds the world has to offer. That all came to a screeching halt, leaving me with a gaping hole in my chest, and the strong resemblance to a deer about to be hit by a semi truck. My "life's work" as I used to call it, was seemingly all for nothing. My years of skills would be wasted and I felt like I had no real life experience, in the world outside of the pressure cooker of dance. So why did I leave this behind and choose to climb the Mount Everest that my panic was forming?

     Ballet became a job.

     The very same art form that tens of thousands of children all over the world did for fun, became a job. The same thing that my former classmates and best friends would say was their passion, became my job. It became the thing that you wake up in the morning dreading. The thing that you need three cups of coffee running through your system in order to tolerate it. It became a tunnel that never ended, that I was just driving down, hoping the end was near because the only other passengers in my car were pain and comparison.
   
     And that's where The Martian comes in.

     As the hero is stuck on Mars, unsure that he'll survive he asks his former Commander via instant message, that if he should die, for her to give his parents the following message, "Tell my parents that I love what I do. And everything is worth it to me." And what made me cry was that it's possible to be at the point of death because of your job, and for you to still love it. Because if dance ever caused my death (which it almost did, but I'll get to that in later posts) my last words would be along the heavy lines of regret, despair and anguish.

    So what I've learned is that your life's work should be something that makes you proud. I don't want to be on my deathbed hating the last many years of my life. Searching for your passion is worth it. Take it from me.

    Signed,
    Emma