After this period of my life, I will somehow find myself “grown up,” but even I keep asking myself over and over, “what do I want to do with my life?”

Career interests have come and gone. Teacher, optometrist, restaurant owner, ballerina, punk rock princess, geneticist, publicist, freelance writer — I wanted to be them all. In high school, my best friend and I were going to nurse sick children back to health and discover the cure for cancer; both of us are now far away from those career dreams.

Today, I am studying to become a psychologist. It has taken me a while, but I’ve realized what areas of my psychology major I am passionate about and which I will pursue. I am trying to find useful, commercial applications for these interests so that I will be self-sufficient after I graduate, but I do not want to become someone trapped in a job I hate just so that I can provide for myself.

How do you survive in this high-priced, commercialized world? In school, so much stress is placed on the useful application of our studies, on our ability to get a good job after graduation, to make sure people will have the money to provide comfortably for themselves. People aren’t just looking for the job that will make them happy any more. Why is there pressure and stress to have so much? Why can’t people just be satisfied with the life God is calling us to live?

I wrestle with the pressure to find a job to pay rent and bills and become the self-sufficient woman I want to be, when a major part of me wants to get married and raise a family once I finish school.

Another thing my best friend and I have always talked about, one dream we’ve always had, is a future filled with love and companionship and every romantic wish we’ve ever had. In short, for many years, we have dreamed of our weddings and our marriage to the perfect man.

I would like to balance both, a career and a family. Women and men should have the choice, the option to stay at home if they want.

Christ’s life and teachings have taught me that there is so much more to life than material possessions. He taught me that what matters in life is our relationships with God, with each other and with ourselves. As the end of university approaches, I will listen closely to what career my heart is telling me to follow, but I will also stay attuned to God’s teachings and look at His work in the examples of good workers and family members around me.

I feel called to help people through psychology, but while I work out the details of my professional career path what I know for sure is that God is calling me to marriage and, one day, motherhood.

(Canaria, 22, studies psychology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.)