What Is Your Purpose?
Alessia Fantuzzi, S8, explores what purpose means and how personal goals and social expectations shape who we become.
Alessia Fantuzzi
Senior 8
Artwork by Naomi Annetts
Art Editor, 2026
If you were to open the Oxford English Dictionary in our school library, go to the ‘p’ section, and skim the pages until your eyes land on a certain word between ‘porpoise’ and ‘purport’, you would find 7 letters and two syllables that have the power to dictate someone’s entire life.
Purpose is generally defined as:
the reason something is done or created or for which something exists.
— and that’s exactly what it is. A general definition. Purpose means something different to all of us, because we all have a different purpose in life.
You could argue that someone’s purpose is definitive from birth, or that you will find yours throughout the course of your life. Not one person’s purpose will ever be the exact same as another person’s purpose, and it’s up to you to distinguish the difference.
Maybe your purpose is to try academically in school, and to follow in the footsteps of great pioneers and researchers. Or perhaps your purpose is to excel in your sporting career, just like your favourite athlete.
Even if you don’t realise it, you’re always going to be working towards being more like the purpose of someone else — your parents, your role models, your favourite film character. Subconsciously, we’re always changing ourselves little by little to fit into the standards set by others, but more importantly to live up to our own expectations.
We’re all trying to follow a purpose set by other people, whether we know it or not. Society has always been set in shades of grey, with changing morals and different expectations of how a specific person should act, talk, think, or work- and you shouldn’t ever have feel the need to fit yourself into a box, or decide on the course of your life.
Your purpose is whatever you want it to be, so step out of your comfort zone, out of your bubble, and search for it.
Find your true meaning. Find yourself.