Tuesday October 29, 2019                      By: Thanaa Hesham

Recently, I have been going through a lot in my life. Each day I ask myself, “Why am I thinking too much?” After reading the book “Women Who Think Too Much”, by Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Professor of Psychology at Yale University, I was surprised to learn that women, all over the world, think more than men. In fact, Dr. Hoeksema proved in one of her studies that women think as twice as much as men. According to her studies, there is more than one reason why women overthink. To a great extent, the reasons are related to two common terms used in our daily life lately; “Modern Society” and “Feminism”. Both put heavy pressure on women’s hearts and shoulders.

“Modern Society” calls on us to race through life. We do not get to walk lightly in life nowadays, we have to run. If we stopped to wonder where we are, we will hear people cheering for us to run. If we take a break to ask ourselves who we are, what do we really love, what is our purpose in life, “Society” will haunt us. It will answer us with a cold smile: “Shouldn’t you be running with them?” The problem is doubled for women. If we can’t find our purpose in life or a career to secure it, society will push us to find a man to marry and settle down.

On the other hand, “Feminism” calls for us to become more independent, nowadays. To have the freedom to choose the lifestyle we went, the career we want to pursue, and whether to have kids or not. All these choices add more pressure on us. We strive to become the perfect wives and mothers, and obviously, the perfect workers. Today’s society needs more women to develop and advance and the more we look around, the more powerful vibes we feel. This leaves many wondering, how to join the community of women who are going places.

Being feminists drives us to work on ourselves constantly. We can’t settle for what is less and we’re always eager to figure out everything in our life. The thing about life is, it does not come with guidelines. And in many cases, we need to stop to take a deep breath. We need to reflect on who we are and where we want to be. We weren’t born to get stuck in one place or with one career.

If we feel we are lost and if we are trying hard to find our purpose in life but can’t reach one,especially, if we have just graduated, maybe we need to remember college is temporary. College is a transition phase. College is the line between who we were and who we want to be. College is where we learn to build who we want to become and how to start a career.

I will always blame schools, in Egypt, for not teaching us anything about ourselves. They don’t teach us how to discover our real passion, what arts we are good at, our potentials or what we are capable of doing. They don’t challenge us to question who we really want to be. They don’t give us an image on how life looks like outside their gates, not even a blurry image.They never pushed us to our limits. As a result, we get stuck in college, for an average of five years where we have no idea why we feel chained to its walls.

Meanwhile, college kills us every day. It pressures us to study, work, and live at the same time. It forces us to discover who we really are. The college years, the different courses, student activities, and exchange programs give us the space and time to know ourselves. We learn that we can be anything other than our major. We may discover that we love writing in a boring class, or we want to work in marketing while studying engineering. College makes us discover how our path is nothing but a rollercoaster. It gives us space to run everywhere. We learn to do this and that, fail in both and try a third time.

College is temporary. When we are eighteen years old, we take a simple decision of joining a major, but what we should teach ourselves is how it is entirely okay to drift apart from that major. We should be taught that what eighteen-years old loved, wanted, and needed are not what they will love, want, and need forever. If we want to throw away your graduation certificate, let’s do it with a huge smile and appreciate and love our real selves and what we want to become.

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