Being me in a family of overachievers

I grew up with a family who all went to college.  It was filled with Doctors, lawyers, Computer programmers and well known ones at that, I think there was an astrophysicist someplace in the cousins. However, most everyone was a Doctor or a Lawyer.  Everyone does such exciting stuff with their lives and have the large high profile jobs.  Then there is me, the only granddaughter out of six grandchildren.
 
I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I loved music and singing so when it was time for collage of course I would be going.  That idea wasted five years of my life.  By the time I left the university I had stage fright enough to end any possible performance job.  Ok, so not knowing what I wanted to be I went on a military Journey with my husband.

Finally had time to think about what I really wanted to do with my life.  Being from my family there is no way I didn't have the brains to do what I wanted to do I just needed to know what I wanted to do.  Also I was my own person so being a doctor or a lawyer simply isn't an option.  I didn't want to follow along in everyone else’s footsteps.  This made me think about what are my strengths.

I have always been the type of person who was fantastic at science.  "Book, You need a book to learn this?" type of person, I decided in all of my glory that I am going to do something in the scientific field.  So what are my interests? This thought process continued for a while.

After long and hard debating I applied for school again in 2009 and started on a criminal Justice and Forensic degree. Which I had to change to Criminology (adding in psychology courses) my thoughts were to work with the base police force (in a lab).  That way no matter where we went, I always had a job.  Then I learned that you can train into being a Medical Examiner without medical school.  So that is what I wanted to do! Plan in place I set out to be my own person.  (Some of you are laughing at me by now)
 
Only recently have I thought about my choices and what I have chosen to do with my life.  I ended up aspiring to be both a Doctor and a Lawyer (in a fashion) no career combines both of those professions better than Criminology and forensics.
 
All of this is great and I know what I want to do with my life now.  But by having such overachieving family members left me lost for a very long time.  I was so terrified of being the only failure in the family that I pushed myself into something I was not ready for.

Only recently have I felt like I was ready to move on with my life and remembered that no matter how amazing my family members are I still have to be myself and in the end the only person I answer to is myself and my husband.