For about five minutes last fall, my daughter debated joining the Peace Corps. She started the whole process, the application and so forth, and got up to the final interview. Before you go on the final interview, they tell you what your placement will be. My daughter would be assigned Togo.
Togo is a sliver of a country in Africa, on the western portion of the continent, east of Ghana, west of Benin and south of Burkina Faso. A small portion of the country is on the Gulf of Guinea.
Geography lesson over.
My daughter decided not to join the Peace Corps because it was really not for her. Nothing against Togo, but this was not how she wanted to spend her gap years between college and law school.
But she agonized a bit about this decision…
Did not wanting to go to Togo mean that she was scared?
My daughter is not one to back away from an intellectual challenge- in fact- she relishes it. She does have fear, but she is not really afraid of most things…
But for some reason she felt like a quitter by not joining up…
I asked her:
Is joining the peace corp something you really want to do, or was it just a very pretty marketing brochure that caught your eye when you were trying to come up with something unique to do before you went to law school?
And she said that yes, the on campus recruitment was very seductive to someone in her position, who didn’t want to be a paralegal or join the company that she interned with over the summer. The peace corps promised experiences that she would never receive in another way. But no, in theory, she did not want to spend two years that far away from NYC.
Did that make her a wimp? Not wanting to do it because she wanted to be around her dog and cat?
We had a whole conversation about how it’s ok to NOT do something. Just because it sounded appealing doesn’t mean she had to jump in with both feet. She explored it, thought about it, and decided that NO, this wasn’t for her.
There’s nothing wrong with making a decision based on how you feel about a situation.
She wasn’t a bad person because she said that Togo was a no go…
Sometimes we get caught up in overthinking things- for attaching too many thoughts to one thing. While thinking about something is important, the listing of the pros and the cons…when it comes down to it, a con is a con if your mind says it is. No further explanation necessary…
The whole peace corps thing brought up a lot of other things…so look towards another Peace Corp blog in the next week or so…