The problem with the future...

...Is that it's completely unknown. A room full of darkness. I am seventeen years old and The Future is something that I'm currently having to feel my way through prematurely, tapping on the walls and sliding my palms around hazy shapes of university courses and job opportunities. What you might think is shaped like an A-grade might actually be a C in disguise. The bannister of work experience that you brush your hand along might lead to a solid shape of Well-Paid Job but the stairs might vanish into an unemployment trap-door instead. It's a dangerous thing to do, mapping out your future. It leaves no room for disappointment.

Right now I (and most other people of my age) are being shot at with questions about the future. Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten years? What they mean by this, of course, is: Which job will you be working in? How much money will you have? Will your education have been worth it? Work, work, work.

Like many people, my answer is an increasingly-panicked I don't know I don't know I don't know! Some people take an exploratory squint into The Future and immediately stub their toe on a vocation. From there the work may not be easy but the planning certainly is. If you know that you are going to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a vet, it's easy to see yourself in five years or ten. Once the distant shape of success is obvious in the landscape of your life yet to come, it's easy to make a route to it. If you know what job you are going to have, it's easy to imagine yourself performing it, easy to conjure up images of somebody with your face in the appropriate uniform, frozen in industrious imagery like scenes from a children's reading sample. For people who know what they want to do, it's easy to present yourself via your job, because your dream job is part of you already.

As a result of having no clue what I want to do, my answers are all slightly unorthodox. My visions of my future self all seem to revert to frivolity. I know I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a vet. I know I'd like to see what living in a city is like. I see my twenty-seven year old self as a red-headed figure in heels coming home from an unknown job to a flat with books and house plants and a cat. I see, perhaps, a wedding to a man with a greyed-out face. Children who look like me for lack of any other factor. I want to be successful enough to shop in Waitrose on a regular basis, for lack of better job description, but that isn't as such an acceptable answer.

I want to study English and French at a good university (with old buildings and trees), and I want to write, and my vision of The Future doesn't stretch any further than that. A satisfactory answer for now, perhaps. But when I see myself in five years, a girl with my face but different clothes on, the one thing I know for certain is that this answer will not suffice anymore.