I spent a recent Thursday asking a lot of teenagers a variation of the same question: Do you know what you’d like to do after high school?

It’s a question teenagers are asked on a regular basis, and as student after student wandered by my photography booth at the Liberty High School career fair, many had ready answers.

I heard about dreams of working in marine biology, heading upstate to explore their options in computer science, and a few futures in photography.

But I noticed something happening when kids told me they didn’t have an idea of what would happen after school was over.

Shoulders dropped. Eyes shifted toward the ground. Feet began to shuffle.

Many — not all, but many — seemed ashamed to admit that they — at all of 15, 16, 17 — don’t yet know what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

Who really does?

As you sit here, reading my words, think back to your high school years. What did you think you’d be doing? How many kids did you think you’d have? Did you think you’d be married or unmarried? Where did you think you would be living?

Flash back to today. How many of those premonitions actually came true? How would you feel if they had?

I was one of those kids with a plan.

I was 16 years old and absolutely sure that I was going to become a political speech writer, traveling the world with future presidents. It’s a destination I would end up abandoning after a semester of political science classes that bored me to tears.

Having a plan certainly didn’t make me any better off than classmates who shrugged their shoulders when asked about their post-high school plans. Having a plan didn’t mean I was smarter or more likely to succeed (no matter what my high school yearbook says).

I had to barrel out into the real world, make a ton of mistakes, pick myself up, dust myself off, make some more mistakes, and eventually find my way to the real post-high school, real life me.

If you’d told senior high school me that one day I would move back to Sullivan County willingly, that one day I’d be a mom to a child who is the center of my world, that I’d be working in marketing by day and a photographer by night, I’m sure I would have been angry and eager to prove you wrong. But I know this is exactly the “who” that I am supposed to be.

To the kids out there who have no clue what will come next, I say this: Good. You are going to have one heck of an adventure figuring it out.

And to the kids who have a capital P Plan, I hope it all works out. But if it doesn’t, that’s OK too. Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. Make more mistakes. Eventually, you’ll get there.