A chance meeting in Chile may have helped me figure out my plan

I’m at that weird point in my life where I have all this time in the world to do exactly I want to do, but don’t really have a clear idea of what that actually is, looks like, or entails.

When people ask me where I see myself in five years, 10 years, 20 years, the answer is always the same and comes in the form of a blank stare and a lame, “I’m just not good at answering these questions, is all.”

But the truth is that I just don’t know. Does anyone just out of school have any idea? Do adults actually have any idea? These are questions I’m also no good at answering but would love to hear someone else’s thoughts on.

I have a foggy vision of what I want to see my life turn into and what I want to be doing. Traveling and writing, in that order, more than anything. But it’s more of a question of how to make that happen.

I’ve been traveling Chile for the last three weeks and have only met a handful of other Americans. Less than a handful, actually. I can count them all on one hand.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down in a Starbucks in the middle of Santiago only to strike up conversation with a woman from Charlotte, North Carolina. 

The world is a freaky place.

After a career in private schools around Charlotte teaching English as a Second Language, she sold her house to pick up and move to Santiago to teach English for a year.

To be fair, she isn’t in love with Santiago and will most likely return to Charlotte by March, but talking to her kind of helped what might be a two-year plan fall into place.

We both graduated from small schools with degrees in English doing the exact opposite of what we set out to do. I started school with the intention of becoming a high school English teacher but dropped that like a hot potato halfway through when I realized that teaching isn’t all about being The Cool Teacher — to pursue literary studies. She had no intention of teaching until ESL was something she found she enjoyed and was a good fit for her degree.

I know this sounds crazy, but I think my conversation with her put everything into focus. I always hear about people my age that pack up and run off for a year or two to teach English in faraway places because they don’t have a clear idea of what they want to do either (but I’m not saying that this is why she’s here).

It’s something I never thought I’d be interested in, though, because I don’t speak any other languages despite trying hard to learn and because I’m still sure that dropping my education major was the right choice.

Now, though, I feel like fate is literally screaming at me to consider it. To just do it. Soon. Because maybe it’ll center me and help me get through the fog that is my early twenties in order to help me figure out just where I should be and how to get there. Moreover, it’ll jump-start the whole traveling and writing, in that order, thing.

And all it took was meeting someone in Charlotte in the last place I’d ever have expected to.

Funny how life works, huh?