Where life has gotten me so far

I have taken several sporadic growing paths since graduating high school in the spring of 2018. Growing up, I was always interested in the American fashion industry and its lines of evolutionary change over the years. It was my leading pursuit to follow through throughout my life, whether simply writing for fashion magazines or even being gifted the blessing of having my fashion lines walk runways each season.

Pursuing this dream, I started by stepping into modeling agencies while working at a restaurant and bar on the side. One of the many things I have noticed in life is that when stepping towards one destination, humans always seem to be handed a new lesson to start learning. It all depends on whether we are willing to open our minds to learn it. In this particular scenario, a broad number of different languages are used for communication around me. Having grown up in Northern Maine and New Hampshire as a child, aside from English, the most I heard spoken was French, carried over the border from New Brunswick and Quebec, or a little Gaelic whenever conversations started getting more serious. While in New York, I needed help to keep up with the number of languages spoken around me. With all these different languages spoken around me, I decided to learn more languages for myself. Sadly, I failed in the French department and continued struggling with keeping each word and phrase glued throughout my brain. But while one language kept me stuck, many others started roaming throughout my brain, looking for a place to settle. I started learning German, which has now stuck fluently in the reading department and continues to grow daily regarding verbal communication. Once German felt sufficient, my interest in foreign languages grew as I started learning Greek, Italian, Scottish, and Russian while doing bits of Chinese and Korean for fun. As time passed, the list of languages grew to include Swedish and Welsh, and who knows which others are to come?

With a start to one path comes the time to end one with another. I decided to leave the fashion industry dream for the time being due to the cruel expectations they put upon our bodies, expecting us to live as robots or mannequins and never grow, change, or be anything other than what they tell us to be. Luckily for myself, I still had my job as a server and bartender to keep me on my feet after leaving the fashion industry.

Once 2021 came along, I decided it was time to take a breather from the experiences and instead stick to the main thing I had been doing on the side this whole time since graduating high school: hiking and writing. I returned to the white mountains of New Hampshire, the small rocky hills of Acadia National Park in coastal Maine, and even to where I was raised, Baxter State Park in northern Maine. Of course, there is no possible way to get through another whole year without living through something, but with that said, I could put it in other words: there is no possible way to get through another entire year without having something worth writing down. So, the main lesson I have been handed since graduating is, as you have read quite a few times throughout this short story, that you never stop learning, and sometimes it might take a few hard lessons to figure out your true calling.