I was reading a book called Everything, Everything, and it brought up a good point: each and every person on this Earth is the sum of all of the events in his or her life. Everything you experience matters. What makes you, you is the collection of every second, every little experience in your life. Even the seemingly small things matter; take one small experience away, and you may be an entirely different person.

Life is weird that way. We often think about the future, but it's vague; we have no way of knowing what will happen next. We have no clue what new obstacles life will decide to throw in our paths. It's strange to think that you could be a completely different person in a year. During the next year, millions of things will happen. Some will be seemingly minuscule and change us in subtle ways. Others may be drastic. Right now, in the present, there's no way of knowing. There's no way of knowing whether your health will get better or worse, or if your anxiety will diminish, or if you'll learn to be a bit more optimistic. There's no way of knowing about new friends or significant others. There's no way of knowing what these experiences will be, or how they'll shape you.

Five years ago, I was 13 years old, and about to start 8th grade. I knew that I loved reading and writing and running, and I knew that when I thought about the future, it seemed pretty certain: I was going to run marathons, and I was going to be a speech therapist, and I was going to be in band until college, and I was going to do theatre in high school.

At least, I thought so.

I never would have expected to be paralyzed a month later. I never would've expected that I would end up letting go of every single one those aspirations. I never would've expected to love to sing or love to write in a completely different way. I never would've thought that I'd have the friends I have. I never would've thought that I would be who I am today; though some of the same traits remain, I often feel like I am, in many ways, opposite of that girl who lived 5 years ago.

I held onto that speech therapist dream for so long. I was proud that I'd known what I wanted to be back when I was just 8 years old or so and stuck with it until my senior year of high school. I thought I was certain.

The thing is, I knew it wasn't right. I knew that it wasn't truly my dream anymore; I changed too much. But I needed something to be constant in my life. I needed to hold onto something from the past me. I needed some reminder that I was still the person I was when I was 8, or 10, or 13.

When my band dream was crushed, and I let go of my theatre dream, and my marathoner dream was shattered.... Well, it felt like way too many pieces of me were missing. And I needed to hold onto one of the last pieces: the speech therapist dream.

So that stayed constant. That is, until college got closer and everything got more and more real, and I realized that that was not who I was anymore. Being a speech therapist no longer appealed to me in the way it used to.

I was too changed. I needed to do something different. What really interested me most was something more in the medical field; I felt like I could really put myself into that type of job.

That's why I started thinking about audiology. But with audiology, I was still trying to hold onto that old piece; just like with speech pathology, I'd still be majoring in communication disorders, and it was a pretty similar field. Audiology sounded fairly interesting, but it didn't feel exactly right.

So I let go. I forced myself to let go.

I stepped into a whole new world, finally accepting that I'd changed and finally accepting that it's okay to lose pieces of yourself. Because, the thing is? Those pieces are quickly replaced with new ones. They may be a lot different, but they're still good; just because you let go of certain, doesn't mean you have holes inside of you.

As those experiences—both big and small—start adding up, everyone grows and matures greatly. It's impossible to be the same person you were as a kid. As we grow and are influenced by so many experiences and other people, our personalities change a bit and are molded into who we are now.

So I've decided that being a physician assistant is what best fits with who I am now. And after probably 10 years of "knowing" that I wanted to be a speech path, this sudden change is very scary. I feel like I don't quite know who I am anymore; my future career seemed to be a big part of who I was.

But we're all trying to find ourselves right now, I think. At 18, it's hard to know who we are exactly, or what we want in life.

And that's okay. Because we're still young; we're still being changed ever-so-slightly by those little experiences day after day.