#15 is true. Up until i stopped knowing what i wanted to be, i wanted to be a veterinarian. I knew it, and my whole family knew it, and it was a fact. Then, high school came along. Biology… not a problem. Math… not my favourite, but doable. However, definitely the class that put me off to any career in the sciences was the dreaded Chemistry.
Granted, i actually enjoy Chemistry a good deal more than it’s ugly sidekick Physics, but our school’s Chemistry teacher was nearly certifiably insane and all i ever learned from her is how to make sourpatch kids burst into coloured flames and launch across the room. From the first quarter of Sophomore year onwards, i knew that my being a puppy-doctor was out of the question (also, my dear mother had the presence of mind to point out that i am deathly afraid of dogs over a third of my body weight or with teeth significantly larger than mine). I slowly edged away from it… first saying i would be a psychiatrist (could you picture me in med school? what a train wreck that would’ve been), then downgrading to a psychologist (i was pretty serious about that until i found out that psychology majors don’t usually wind up as psychologists), and then just winding up undecided in my Senior year of highschool (which definitely hurt my college application process, but oh well).
What i’m left with now is a patented fear of all things quantitative. Nevermind that Biology is my favourite subject and that i used to be the Christian league math champion – i just don’t feel like my head is fit to contain scientific knowledge. On the other end of things, i scoff at academians and their philosophy and sociology (and, dear god, who would ever want to be a lawyer? Not i…). So i’m left here with journalism, by default.
Of course, journalism is what i actually want to do, but i think i want to do it a little too much. My vision of being a journalist is something like someone’s vision of being an astronaut; i know i’m technically capable of it but i just can’t picture it ever happened. Add to that the fact that i really only want to be a magazine journalist and not a newspaper journalist, and that i’m going to a school that tends to graduate people into neither of the above fields, and you find out that my entire life is royally fucked and that i want to take a do-over. Or, maybe just a do-over from when i wrote undecided on my college applications, or from when i decided i hated Chemistry (and by extension all other sciences), or from when learning stopped fascinating me too early to learn the things i should’ve learned so i could stay fascinated. And here i am claiming all i could ever know how to do is just mingle fact and opinion day in and day out, and there’s not necessarily a lucrative market for that. But i don’t get a do-over, just a “please pull forward.”
Fuck. I think i’m going to go and cry now.