"You are not going to uni?"
Since I started working here I have met quite a lot of new people and that includes a ton of au pairs. Usually the conversations that you have with new people are about similiar things like "where are you from", "what do you like to do in your free time" and "what are you going to do after your gap year?"
And since I moved here my answer was I don't know. I don't know how long I am staying here, I don't know what I am going to do after this and I don't know if I want to go to school next year.
The answer: I don't know if I want to go to school sometimes leaves people with questionmarks written all over their faces. Why wouldn't I want to go to school? Don't I want a degree? Do I not want to start a life?
I have thought about going to uni and moving back to the Netherlands for a very, very long time. Almost every spare minute of my time I have been thinking about what to do with my life.
Every time I went back to Holland I would cry for at least a good couple of hours because I didn't know "what to do with my life". After spending quite some time talking to all the people that I care about the most I figured out that the only reason why I would want to go to university is society.
And no, not a university course that matches with society classes but society, like real people. You and me.
It took me quite a while to come to terms with this partly because I would sometimes get the feeling that people would not take me seriously as I am just an au pair, right? But you know what. Being an au pair or having a job similiar to mine does not mean that you are stupid. Just because I am not going to school right now doesn't mean that I am not moving forward, I have learned so many (oh yeah there she goes) life lessons over the past couple of months. I got more independent, more confident as a person and in the English language and I learn something new almost every day. I am trying to keep myself busy with more than just babysitting and drinking coffees in quirky pop-up cafés. Personally I think it wouldn't make a lot of sense for me right now to go to university as I simply do not want to go right now. Which wouldn't really be the best motivation to start at least a 4 to 5 years course with, haha.
I think sometimes people underestimate how important it is to follow your dreams. And for a lot of time I thought that me not going to university meant that I was lost and not sure what my dreams were. Slowly but surely I realized that those future dreams are not always lined out in a college degree. And sometimes it is. If you feel good about it, do it.
I was talking to a friend the other day, she wants to be an artist and she was talking about how she was not completely satisfied with her work, so she was insecure to show it to other people. The only thing I could think about was is when you want to be a doctor you don't just think "I want to be a doctor" and BOOM! You are a doctor. No, you have to work for it, learn and develop. I think it's the same with any other job out there. You can't always exactly know what you want to do for the rest ( or at least a big part) of the life from one day to the next. It takes time.
Another very important lesson that I learned is just because other people are at university or going to university doesn't always mean that they 100% know where they are going and this has given me a lot of comfort.
No, I am not going to be an au pair forever but you know what I am only 20 and...
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