Ed-you-ma-ka-tion

As you may or may not know, I'm twenty years old.

I'm a public high school graduate from Connecticut and a junior at a private liberal arts college in Massachusetts. I'm the daughter of a woman who has worked all her life, the widow of a victim of cancer (my father, one of the most wonderful human beings to ever walk this Earth), who will hopefully be able to retire in fifteen years or so in her early seventies.

Next May I'll be graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in English. This time next year I will have applied (and hopefully have been accepted to) graduate schools in both counseling or clinical psychology, PsyD programs or MA or PhD programs in English. In the next ten years I hope to get either a PsyD or PhD in counseling/clinical psychology or a PhD in English Literature.

I wonder if every college junior gets as worried as I am now. I'm painfully aware that I'm a type A personality (though most people don't use that classification anymore) and that I get stressed out very easily, but this just seems like so much to be dealing with at one point in time.

Not only do I have to worry about my school work, about my job and about getting jobs and internships lined up in my fields, but I have to worry about graduate school and post-grad and where I want to be in the next 3/5/8/10 years.

I worry so much that in ten years, when I'm thirty and my mom is in her mid-sixties, I'll (hopefully) finally be in a financial position where I can have children and my mom will be too old to enjoy her grandchildren. I worry that with all this education and all the money I'm spending on this education I'll never be in a position where I can support a family financially. I'll always be paying off loans and living in a one-bedroom apartment with screaming babies in the hallway.

I'm just worried I guess, stressed out about everything. Everyone always reminds me that they're XX years old and they still don't know what they want to do with their lives, and that's perfectly fine but I am so worried that if I follow my dreams of getting my education and my PhD and wait another 10,15,20 years to start a family my mother and my aunts and uncles are never going to be able to enjoy my children the way they enjoy my cousin's children (my cousins are mostly significantly older than I am).

It's a lot to think about it so I guess I should just try to worry less, but that's hard to do when you're me.