Fuck It, I Choose Myself

Inside every single one of us, there is a dream. There is a wealthy heart surgeon. A football superstar. A Hollywood actress. There is a best-selling novelist and a head of a beautiful family. There is a businessman and a world traveler. A lawyer, a professor, a musician. There is also something called doubt, a feeling we are bound to from birth to death.

To that, I say “Fuck it, I choose myself”.

We live in a society that expect things from us. It expects us to follow a certain path, study a certain subject, marry a certain person and even believe in a certain God. If you happen to disagree with one of these expectations, too bad. You are a misfit; a rebel that has no sense of gratefulness. You are a self-entitled Millennial who, despite being given every opportunity in the world, has chosen to be selfish.

Except you are not.

My biggest fear in life is dying with regrets. Sharks and serial killers are scary, yes, but nothing comes even close to the hypothetical situation of looking back as I am in my deathbed and realizing I did not do the things I wanted to.

It may sound cliché and all, but it’s true. And the problem is that if it is up to society, that’s exactly what is going to happen. I will go to grad school, get a good paying job, meet a lovely woman, move to the suburbs and start a family.

I don’t to want to wake up in a beautiful house with a beautiful family on April 28th of 2026 and realize that I gave up on all the things I believed in.

The idea of settling down and raising two cute toddlers does sound appealing to me (emphasis on the cute, please), but there is more to life than that.

There is more than doing just what you are supposed to.

That is exactly why I have adopted the “Fuck it, I choose myself” philosophy. I want to choose the path of my life, chose who I am and choose who I become. But don’t get me wrong: that doesn’t make me a selfish greedy bastard. I still want to help and inspire others, serve a community and change the world.

It just means I want to do it my way.

No pressure from my parents, professors or friends. I want to be able to sing like Frank Sinatra did, shouting to the world that, “I’ve lived a life that is full, I’ve traveled each and every highway. And more, much more than this, I did it my way.”

Since realizing that choosing myself allows me to make a greater contribution to the world, I have chased after every dream I have ever had. I left home in Brazil and moved to the United States for college. I backpacked throughout Europe for a whole summer by myself. I finally finished writing my first novel. But there is still much to do. There is New York City this summer, Switzerland in the fall and Washington D.C. in the spring.

And then there is the year after. And 2018. And the rest of my life.

To you, who still need to be convinced, I propose you a challenge. Define what happiness and success means to you. After that, name three people who best match your description. You will most likely find that these people were brave enough to say “Fuck it, I choose myself”.

They were brave enough to battle against the status quo and say “NO!” to society’s expectations.

This is not a rebel’s rant. I’m actually quite the opposite of a rebel. If you look at me, you will just see a normal looking (although my mom says I am cute) college student. Average height, average weight. I have an average job and get slightly above average grades. I am average in most aspects, to be honest.

Not on the ones that truly matter, however.

The mindset is not average and the attitudes are definitely not ordinary.
And that makes all the difference.