I Failed Every Goal I Wanted To Meet Before I Turned 20.
There were so many things I had wanted to do when I turned 19 last year, but what I had been able to do was a whole other story. Thank you, pandemic.
A few months after I had turned 18, I stumbled across a tweet about a woman that had decided to visit the places on her bucket list alone as it meant she wouldn’t have to coordinate budgets, time off work, destination preferences, and things to do while she was there. Genius, I thought to myself, now she can just go wherever and whenever she wants. I decided that as a present to myself for my 19th, I’d take myself to Paris for a long weekend. I live in the South-East of England, so it’s easy for me to take the train to London and then catch the Eurostar directly from London to central Paris. I’d visited Paris on a school trip when I was 14, so I had a rough idea of the things I wanted to do and how I would spend the time, and somewhere in the back of my memory were some (very) basic French sentences from GCSE that I could use if I needed help out there. I had a plan. And then COVID happened, and I realised that I wouldn’t be able to go for my 19th. I was gutted- I get anxious about spontaneity, so I had planned every detail of the hypothetical Paris trip- but decided I’d go for my 20th instead. Now, I’m sitting here typing this, aged 20, planning this hypothetical Paris trip for my 21st. Time flies when you’re in the middle of a global pandemic with an international travel ban to all but 9 countries.
Another accomplishment I’d hoped to make before reaching 20 was to get commissioned to write an article: not for a mind-blowing amount, but maybe even just a fiver for a local zine. Unfortunately, as all of the magazines and local zines I’ve been lucky enough to get published in are small businesses, they don’t have the means to compensate their writers. Even though when I realised I hadn’t met the goal by the time I turned 20 I was really upset, I know now that between uni work, and my part-time job (that turns full-time during uni holiday breaks), having no deadlines or topic restrictions meant I never got overwhelmed. In hindsight, the freedom that comes from picking and choosing when to write, being able to decide what I want to write about, and getting to research which publication would be its best new home was a blessing in disguise. I’ve been able to use the last year to build my portfolio on my own terms, and grow my writing style and interests just in time to start my new uni module in September that’s all about journalism and writing for the media.
A few weeks before my 20th, I was also thinking about what I wanted to do with my life (as you do) after I graduate next July, and stumbled across a TEFL site that lets schools across the world house you for a year so you can teach their pupils English. As a linguistics student, being an English teacher has crossed my mind a few times, but after researching the countries you can stay in, I started thinking about it more seriously. I saw that many of the institutions that are looking to hire native English speakers prefer you to have a TEFL qualification alongside a degree, and without taking a single second to look at any of the details of the qualification, I told myself I’d have it done and dusted by the time my birthday came around. Always one to leave important things to the last minute, I found the TEFL course the week before my 20th, and saw that it’s a minimum of 120 hours and £1400. I don’t really have a big problem with the length of the course, especially as it will hopefully lead to some amazing teaching opportunities around the world, but the price had me almost physically recoiling. Where was a teenage university student working at a fast-food restaurant supposed to find £1400? Suffice to say, I failed at completing it before I turned 20, and I still have yet to return to the course’s enrolment site purely because the sight of such a large figure scares me too much. On the plus side, it motivated me to do some deeper research and I found that there’s actually a few schools that will hire teachers without the TEFL qualification, as long as they have a university degree and are native English speakers.
The point is, as I’ve been finding out a lot lately, things change for all manner of reasons: from financial situations, to out-of-nowhere deadly contagious viruses, to a simple change of mind. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed or passed your time- the things we want to do often have no time limit. Paris won’t stop existing just because I haven’t made it back there yet, just like making money as a freelancer is possible at any age as long as you put your mind to it. Never let anybody tell you that something is ‘too late’ for you to achieve.
