Contributor: Speak Coffee
I have no idea how old I was when I first got the question. But I know it came from my father’s friends from work. They’d always ask me if I wanted to do what my father did. Hands down: no. It never even crossed my mind. Scratch one item off my list: no biology.
In first grade I said I wanted to be a teacher, when really I just meant that I wanted to be Mrs. Dalghren. I kept saying this through third grade, when really I just wanted to be Mrs. Lake. Then somewhere in middle school I stopped having really cool teachers, or at least teachers that I thought the moon rose and sat for. That and I started babysitting whereby I learned that I do not have patience for children in large doses. Scratch two off my list.
I went to college to get a “practical” degree. I was good with computers and had taken a couple programming classes in high school. So here I was armed with my basic HTML, a little C++ and Visual Basic (Does anybody still use VB? Because I thought I was pretty hot stuff in that class and no one ever seemed to be able to tell me what to do with that skill) and I was thinking that I’d take all these classes, graduate, and be this awesome webpage designer. Except my college C++ class was the most illogical thing ever. I only passed the first semester because I had already learned the material in a much more step by step, intuitive method previously. The second semester was taught in a little hole in the basement classroom with no windows, few lights, and an instructor who’s voice would have put me to sleep even if the material wasn’t sonorous. It was the only final exam, the only test period, that I have ever failed.
Semester ended, I took my passing D+ and wrote an evaluation that read “this class made me want to be an English major.”
It would be another semester before I made good on that threat.
I thought I’d try something else that also seemed practical: Communications. Oh, think all the wonderful things that communications encompasses. Speech writers, radio DJs, newscasters, magazine editors ... and all the students who could get into those classes might have become any of those things. I was not such a student. My registration lottery number sucked. Well scratch comm. off my list.
Then I thought I’d go to law school and do all these non-law things with the degree. Politics maybe? But it turns out I didn’t like law students or the things that attorneys did as attorneys. Mostly I just wanted to tell the legislators I saw on c-span that they were being stupid and have the credentials to make them sit down and shut up.
Some things never crossed my mind. Playing the tuba was one of them.
My point is that I was doing this whole planning for the future thing by process of elimination. Same as the test taking technique they teach you to use when you don’t know which answer to bubble in.
My problem is that there are too many bubbles to choose from. And my method is not equipped to deal with the outside pressure of a) parents, b) relations, c) people I meet who want to know what I “do” and most importantly d) that little voice inside me that agrees with all of these people that I’m useless and worthless unless I successfully “do” something worthwhile.
That voice turned up the volume my junior year of college. That’s when all my senior friends made plans for their lives that started the day after graduation that didn’t include classes.
When my own senior year rolled around, students from my writing seminar asked me what I was going to do when I graduated. I told them law school. “Really?” they all asked. “You don’t want to be a writer?” I told them glibly that I also wanted to eat.
Stupid me.
It was all the pressure of the Plan. Not only did I think I had to have one, I thought I had to have a good one. Assuming writer did not equal food I equated it with a bad Plan. Lawyer equaled food and money left over for shelter therefore good Plan. Despite the fact that my father repeatedly told me to find something that I loved, my own happiness never factored into my Plan. I just knew that I could be an attorney, that I was capable of doing the work and the schooling because I excelled at difficult but logical things.
Scratch that Plan off the list.
