The Life You Build

Having a strong internal locus of control means believing events in your life are primarily the result of your own actions.

It’s funny to think about how you didn’t even know what a locus of control was two months ago, and now it’s possibly one of the most important things in your life. You’ve had this image in your head for the longest time. You’re standing on the sidewalk on a crowded street with the wind blowing through your hair and the sound of traffic horns wreaking havoc on your eardrums, and you’re happy. Now, it’s a reality, and you’re not quite sure how you got here.

You remember sending in the application and prepping for the exam. You don’t think you could ever forget that. The planners, the notes, the *cough* legally downloaded textbooks, the study techniques, the time blocks. You’d never studied this hard before and a part of you wondered whether this would even be worth it. After all, you were smart but you weren’t that smart, were you? Your fears were realised twenty minutes into the exam and when you walked out of that hall, you’d resigned yourself to the fact that four months of blood, sweat, and tears were going to amount to nothing. That’s why you didn’t tell anyone when the results were going to come out. You’d check it yourself, process the disappointment, and laugh it off when the inevitable sympathy started pouring in. That was the plan and it was a good one. Of course, all of that changed when you first saw your name. You vaguely remember hearing your voice going, “Oh my god, I got in” and then you were almost suffocated by the group hug that followed.

There were a lot of things to plan after that and you never really stopped to think about how much your life was going to change. You visited the hostels, bought your supplies, and sat through all of the lectures on responsibility and before you knew it, you were sitting in your hostel room, in a city that was a state away from the bedroom you grew up in. Your diaries are still in your cupboard, your guitar is still lying in the corner of your room, collecting dust and you can’t do your fit checks in your dressing table mirror anymore. Instead, you’ll be here, drinking tiny cups of coffee and listening to popstar music on the way to college. It’s a life you chose to build and now that you made your dream a reality it’s time to go find a new one.