Now that it’s officially 2014, the year that I graduate from Duquesne, I’ve been musing a lot about where I’m going from here and what I want to achieve in the next 40+ years of my life.  For a long time, I just expected myself to go to grad school, as if there wasn’t any other route.  But the further I went in my studies, the more I realized that Academia, though warm and inviting and the only thing I’ve ever really known or been good at, is not really all that exciting.  I do not sneer at professors and other scholars; after all, they are responsible for the knowledge I have obtained in the last 17 or so years of my academic career.  However, as much as I admire those who have dedicated their lives to perpetuating information, I simply cannot count myself among them.

For 22 years, I have been a student first and a human being second.  I have missed countless opportunities because of studying or editing a paper for the 5th or 6th time.  Do not misunderstand me, I am supremely proud of my accomplishments.  The thing is, I’m mostly just bored.  I can’t get excited about committing my life to research on 18th century British Romantic Poets (as much as I fancy myself a quasi-Blake scholar).  Even more, I don’t have the conviction or patience to be a professor.  In fact, I’d probably be an awful professor because I’m in the business of withholding information that I think one should be able to figure out for himself.

In this realization that I shouldn’t be a professor, there was obviously some strife.  My dream forever has been to attend Yale University to get a phD in literature.  While that may have stemmed from an obsession with the Gilmore Girls, the first future I ever really imagined was obtaining a degree in journalism from Yale before writing a foreign affairs column in The New York Times.  My ambitions changed significantly before college when I decided to pursue medicine, a desire that quickly fizzled out when I recognized I would be spending my life first in classrooms and then later, white examination rooms.

So at the end of the musing, at the cusp of graduating with a degree in English and a degree in my accidental passion Public Relations, I have begun struggling with the idea of normalcy.  For quite some time, the specifics of the path I have chosen didn’t seem to make me feel extraordinary.  Thoughts of medical school and Yale and grad school in general– I thought I could set the world on fire.  I want to live a life that counts for something, that makes somebody better because I was around.

And now, after musing- I’m starting to change my perspective.  Because if I ask you a question, say “Who do you admire?” the answers would be slightly superficial (Audrey Hepburn, J.K. Rowling, Vincent Van Gogh, for example).  But even more common than that, I’d also hear answers like “my mother, my uncle, my fifth grade teacher.”  Honestly, those would be the most genuine answers.  The people who inspire us to be bigger and better and more hopeful are more often the people that we know and have spoken with, not the people that we see on a tv screen or hear on the radio.

See, it’s really not about the number of people who know your name.  It’s not about how glamorous your lifestyle appears to the masses.  The ways in which we are extraordinary are found in the marks we leave on the lives of others.

My mother is probably the most striking example of that truth in my own life.  A stay-at-home mom of two girls after a career as a secretary at PNC Bank for over 20 years, it’s not likely that many people remember her name or face.  She hasn’t inspired teenage girls around the world as a pop idol or a teenage dream.  But she did inspire one very important teenage girl– me.  She is simply the hardest-working, most caring person that I know, and she doesn’t even have a college degree.

So yes, while there is an appeal to fame and glory, the truly extraordinary person is made not in academia or celebrity, but in humility.  In kindness.  In advice and laughter and courage.  At the end of the day, what names do you remember, who do you thank a higher power or the universe for?  We should not fear normalcy.  Because, often, it is in our normalcy that we become extraordinary.