Advice I’m Glad I Ignored
I come from a place where dreaming too much is a liability. I did it anyway.
I didn’t have a plan. I want to be honest about that upfront.
I didn’t have a scholarship lined up, a mentor guiding me, or a clear vision of what my life would look like on the other side. I had ambition and a wifi connection and a quiet, stubborn feeling that I was meant for something I hadn’t seen yet.
That’s not a lot to go on. But it was what I had.
I come from a small town. The kind where everyone knows everyone, where a quiet invisible ceiling is visible right from your childhood, where the advice you receive isn’t cruel, it’s just practical. Don’t reach too far. Don’t risk what’s working. Decent is enough. Decent is more than most people get.
Nobody told me not to dream because they wanted to hurt me. My family loved me. They still do. They were scared in the way people are scared when they’ve seen what failure costs people who don’t have safety nets. When you don’t come from privilege, a gamble isn’t romantic. It’s just a gamble.
I understood that. I still do.
And yet.
I wanted to be a lawyer. First in my entire family, which meant there was no map, no one to call, no blueprint. Just me figuring it out in real time and hoping I was figuring it out correctly.
Then I wanted to go abroad. To another continent. To struggle more, not less, in a place where I knew no one and nothing was familiar and everything decent I had built would have to be rebuilt from scratch.
Even I thought it was too much. I sat with the application for a long time before I submitted it. I ran the math. I knew what I was leaving. I didn’t fully know what I was going toward.
Everyone asked why.
I didn’t have a good answer to why. Not one that would satisfy anyone. Not one that made practical sense. I just knew that if I didn’t try, I would spend a long time wondering. And wondering felt worse than failing.
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So I took a gamble on myself.
I won’t dress this up into something neater than it was. It was hard. There were months abroad that felt like a mistake. Moments I thought about the decentish life waiting at home and couldn’t remember why I’d walked away from it.
But here’s the thing about advice that comes from fear: it’s not wrong exactly. The fears are usually real. The risks are real. The possibility of failure is real.
It just isn’t the whole picture.
What the advice couldn’t account for was what it would feel like to bet on myself and not lose. To find out I was capable of more than the ceiling I’d grown up under. To become, slowly and messily, someone I actually recognized.
I come from a place where dreaming too much is considered a liability. I understand why. I don’t blame anyone for teaching me that.
But there was one thing I decided early that I was not going to let anyone take away from me. Not out of defiance, not to prove a point, just because it was the only thing that felt fully mine.
The right to dream.
That’s all I had when I applied. That’s all I had when I boarded the flight. Some days it still feels like all I have.
It turns out it was enough.
This piece is written for Quirky Rants’ writing challenge — “Advice I’m Glad I Ignored”. Thank you for this writing challenge Rishita Sharma💗
This piece is written for Quirky Rants’ writing challenge — “Advice I’m Glad I Ignored”. We all have that one moment where fear was loud, but our inner voice was louder. Because sometimes the best thing you can do for your future is disappoint a few expectations. If you’ve lived that moment, tell the story your courage wrote.
📌 This story is published under Quirky Rants — a home for unfiltered thoughts, everyday oddities, and real, relatable voices.
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