Julie's Jukes: What is my purpose?

By Julie Newell
Editor in Chief

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately. It’s hard not to if you are like me and can’t shut off your brain at night, so you stay up for hours thinking about everything and anything.

You think about what things you have to get done the next day. You remember that thing you couldn’t remember earlier. Or that thing you said or did in middle school that was incredibly embarrassing suddenly pops into your head for no reason.

Lately, I have been doing a lot of thinking about my future. I’ve been thinking about the near and distant future.

The upcoming fall semester will mark the start of my final year at LCC. I’ve been thinking about what things I will have to do after I graduate. I’ve been thinking about what area of sign language interpreting I want to go into, how I will need to find another job and how I will have to move again.

Then, this past Sunday at church one of the questions my pastor asked the congregation at the end of his message was: “What is your purpose in life?”

That one question really stuck with me because it is something I have struggled with for a while. Often, we mistake our work or careers as our purpose in life. Sometimes those things coincide, but often not. Our work is what we do, not who we are.

This question also got me thinking about not only what my purpose is, but who I am as a person. I have struggled with my identity since elementary school when I got verbally bullied by a large portion of my classmates. The bullying didn’t stop until I got into ninth grade.

When it stopped, at first, I was happy. But then after a while I realized I didn’t know who I was. I spent years trying to get the bullying to stop by trying to change myself and how I talked and acted so people would like me, and to stop bullying me.

At one point in middle school, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the person staring back at me.

College is usually where people start to fully figure out who they are. If my career is not who am I, then who am I? What is my purpose?

I guess I still have a lot of thinking to do.