"I'm sorry you're sad, here's some kittens"

If you go around the average elementary school and ask "what do you want to be when you grow up?" You'd get a slew of answers. In elementary school i wanted to be a missionary doctor.  My little sister wanted to be a grizzly bear. She ended up making much better grades than I did in school, so there's a sermon right there. We all (maybe I'm making an over generalization here) made thought-out plans growing up of what we wanted to do with our lives.  I assumed by now I would have already have built 20,000 orphanages, learned six languages, and lived for a short period in Uzbekistan for the hell of it. Instead, All I've managed to do is watch every episode of 30 Rock to the point where if my fever is high enough, I will wake up actually believing I'm Liz Lemon in the body of an overly-scrawny blonde chick still waiting for her breasts to arrive.

I've never heard a life story that didn't involve a change of plans, especially in the young adult years. In the day and age of technology, while technology is so wonderful and useful, we see the glorified pictures of everyone else. I fall for it too. We purposely avoid admitting when things didn't go according to plan, and only show the best of ourselves. Maybe you didn't do well in a particular major or you lost a job right after sharing the exciting news that you got one right after college. Maybe you're scared about keeping your marriage intact and everyone else seems so happy in their relationships. In both high school and college, I found out I graduated with honors the day before graduation. Both were rather humorous situations where I was handed a cord/card and stood staring at it in extreme confusion like "wait, I did this?" In college I subsequently hid it from those around me so no one knew I wasn't summa, regardless of me believing just a minute prior that I didn't even make cum laude. In the mind of a perfectionist, one is always stuck in the never-ending category of failure. In so many situations, we feel like we're sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else playing the game when God put us in a completely different game to begin with. In a utopian society where the Broncos and Panthers are the best football teams (shut up. stop laughing), it's like a Panthers player watching a Broncos player on the television and somehow feeling like a failure for not being in it. It's not your game. 

I made plans in high school to go into cosmetology and move to the beach, only to end up in the middle of a landlocked state that has never heard of vinegar-based barbecue sauce to obtain a random degree in premedical biology and a couple sciency minors I can't remember. I also had no plans of ever getting married. Life is weird that way. And it seems like every time some huge life change happens, it comes in clusters, or the "rule of three" as the Bible stated it. Or maybe it was 30 Rock, I can't remember. One of those two. Unfortunately, today my husband and I found out we didn't make it to medical school this year. We both received the same letter with the whole "thank you for spending a year and a half of your life sending in primary applications, secondary applications, an interview date, extra shadowing, harassing your professors for a recommendation, and 200 bucks. We totally loved you, but Bob was better" and the subtle troll meme face watermark. On top of it, Dennis' car broke down last week for good and we've seen no progress in the monoclonal antibody treatment for his chronic autoimmune condition. And after hearing the news, I drove to my job in a "woe is me, my brain and life have failith" attitude, contemplating how I would end up in the same place forever until I was eventually buried with my two new cats and a gravestone that said nothing other than "well....she tried." At work I sat down and immediately corrected ECG mistakes, picked up my immunology book for light reading, corrected a misspelling of the word "tyrosine," looked up "thyrosine" on Wikipedia to see if there was actually some alternate form of tyrosine I didn't know about, then corrected enzyme misspellings on the Wikipedia article about tyrosine. It was around looking up new research on NCBI involving stem cells and a 3D printer that I realized that 1. I'm completely insane and 2. God created me with nerd attaching to my hemoglobin instead of oxygen. I realized that I was taking this as completely my own doing, and chuckled at the thought of me assuming that missing a year somehow made me a failure and meant I should give up on reapplying. I believed that If I didn't make it and the kid who spent half of his time in college giving himself cirrhosis of the liver and the other half picking lint off his nipples in the back of the class made it, that means something is wrong with me and everyone would know it. 

The problem is that I believed somewhere deep down inside that I controlled the outcome of my entire life and would be rewarded for working hard in the way I wanted. Life doesn't work that way. Very few people get into the first job they apply for or the first graduate/medical school. I would have to admit that there's this Higher Power up there that may actually know more than me about my own life, no matter how much I try to prove to Him that I totally have it handled. And if the worst thing about my week is that I'll have to wait another year to spend 150 grand on higher education just to be later colloquially crapped on by malpractice suits, I'm having a much easier time than 99% of the world. Plus, we have two super cute kittens now, and I'd like to think of it as a cute makeup for a crappy week. Like "Hey Cassie, sorry you're sad, here's some kittens." - God

So here's to the future (I'm making a toast with my hospital coffee that due to the taste may or may not actually be the remnants of a colostomy bag). None of us have complete control over it. Sometimes you end up in a  different place in life than you expect, which makes you similar to approximately everyone else on planet Earth as well as Gallifrey. Instead of comparing ourselves negatively to everyone having "more fun," and being "more successful" according to edited pictures, it's way more important to focus on our own moments in our own game. Luckily we don't get "lol we liked you but not really" slips from heaven. Our purpose in life isn't influenced by other people's expectations of where we should be. I think life is more interesting with detours anyways.