college

The funny thing about college, I never equated the classes I took with what I wanted to be. Oh, I started out with a plan, to be a psychiatrist. But in the first semester biology lab my professor pulled me aside and urged me to reconsider my pre-med major after I almost hyperventilated from the prospect of dissecting a crawfish. (Good thing you have partners in lab and no, for some reason I didn't have to dissect anything in high school. Not even that frog anatomy computer program.) I don't even know why I wanted to be a psychaitrist, aside from a purely imagined scenerio of me in a Ally McBeal-type suit sitting across the table questioning an insane man who believed he was a werewolf. That was it.

After that, I just took classes because I wanted to get a degree. That simple. Nothing else really felt like it was actually a career possibility. In my journalism and design classes, I always felt like a fake. I thought writers and artists were just born that way, it seemed pretend to learn it in college. I felt like a fake. I felt like I wasn't good enough, even with people telling me I was. I've been horribly self-conscious my whole life. I'm just now starting to not care what people think (and, yes, I know chances are they aren't thinking about me anyway). Now I'm learning that I am a writer and I am an artist. Not because of classes I took and certainly not because of what I do for a living, but just because that's who I am. I'm learning that nobody can stop you from being who you want to be except you. And nobody can make you who you want to be except you.