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What Am I Doing?

Benjamin St. Pierre

Connector Staff

I’m an English major, and becoming this never felt like a choice. It was never something I even had to think about; there was never any internal deliberation about which major I’d choose, or even where I wanted to go to college. I never took the time to stress out over all that, because I have always had my sights set on only one thing: writing.

I’ve always viewed reading and writing as means of escaping an increasingly mechanized, overly orderly, money-beats-all world, and a blank page that’d soon come to store my ideas has always meant more to me than the fanciest of manmade, concrete constructs. You can walk by a skyscraper and look up in awe and wonder about how it’s even built, but I have always found it more mind-blowing that worlds could be created, altered, or entirely destroyed on a piece of paper. That we’re all the gods of whatever existences we wish to grow in the soil of a sheet.

For me, to write is to invent a world in which no one has any say in its events besides you, and to major in English is to know that not everything is an equation, or requires an irrefutable final answer. But is to know that not everything resides on a straight line, that not knowing is knowing, and that the mysteries of life are what make life livable.

I’ve said I’ve always known that I’d major in this, but I don’t even know for sure what I want to do in my life, and maybe that’s a common criticism of humanities majors in general. But I don’t think anybody should even pretend to know how their life will unfold. Acting like you know how exactly your STEM major will turn out is like saying you can’t hang out with a friend on a day twenty years in the future because you’ll be at work, and you may as well tell him or her when you die so they can prepare for the funeral.

I’m never set on one, unchangeable career. I’m content with always having different ideas float through my head every day. In English, I have my set concentration (Journalism and Professional Writing), and there’s the constant (definitely appropriate) mantra about getting a job out of college for all of us, but to me, in English, I feel that I can just breathe. I feel like I’m an individual whose thoughts are important, and when I see blankness turn to fullness, with the fullness composed of my own thoughts, I know it is what I want, even if the exact job can and will change over the decades in the “real world.” I know it will, and I’m not afraid of that. I welcome it. I’m not afraid of uncertainty, because that just means I can spend my whole life changing my methods of discovering things through the worlds I create with the words I share. I hope everybody has their unique passion, because this is something I really hope I can have and do my whole life.

It feels like we all worry so much about doing whatever it takes to get a job out of school that we push aside doing whatever it takes to enjoy our youth while we have it. In this day and age, with infinite college debt and a nerve-wracking job market, we never stop and think about why we all worry so much.

We never remind ourselves that all our struggles are literally nonexistent outside of our own minds, and that we try to be “work ready” so much more than simply trying to be ready for each new day, and enjoying what we have while we have it. That’s backwards.

Majoring in English is an escape from all that. I don’t mean to sound pretentious or pompous, either, as maybe any non-humanities major could (fairly) shrug this all aside as unrealistic, utopian rhetoric, but I just don’t understand how somebody could hold their potential job prospects and “promised” income higher than having a job that makes you happy in nonfinancial ways.

What it often seems to come down to, most of the time, is the inescapable reality of money mattering in life. Why, yes it does. But to me, and seemingly most English and other humanities majors, money has never been the most important thing; I didn’t come from it, and I don’t particularly want it. I want to be able to afford necessities, sure, but more importantly, to be happy every single day, helped by holding a job that isn’t a dull job, but an extension of my passions. For me, it’s writing, or perhaps teaching writing, and for you, maybe it is math, or engineering, or history, or nursing, or whatever else it is that you love. Hopefully, you’re majoring in what you love. Into this, I’ve injected what I’m passionate about, but I hope that everybody is able to read this, substitute my passion for theirs, and major in what they love instead of feeling bound by what jobs may or may not even be available down the line, or overbearing parents, or anything else which restricts your individuality.

You have never lived before, and never will again after your time expires, so why should somebody else tell you how to live, or push you into something that you truly do not want to do? I know it’s hypocritical of me to ask that, while preaching about majors, but my point is that we all have to live as we want to; if you want money, go for it, but if that’s not what you’re about, and you feel pressured into what you’re doing for one reason or another, remember you only have one life. It’s never too late to change your career later in life, but you only have one youth, and we shouldn’t stress ourselves out by holding ourselves to unattainable standards of perfection. We should all just try to be happy, and enjoy this, because this is life, and it isn’t going to last forever.

To tie this into a phrase that I often think about, I do not believe I’ll ever be truly “work, life, and world ready”… I will never know what the next day will bring. I will never know which jobs I’ll hold in the future, and I’ll never be able to know what’ll happen in my life until everything unfolds. The world we live in is something defined by change, and all we can do every day is get through every day. What we add to the monotony is a defining characteristic of how we view the world, and what I hope we are all able to add to the world are our ideas on the individual passions we hold dear, which should never go to waste. Don’t live without doing what you love, opening it up to the world, and being in constant pursuit of happiness. We should hold being happy above making money or being perfect.

For me, I want to be able to write and make my own worlds, and I’m ready for that to be my life’s work. I hope it turns out that way, and I hope you can always do whatever you desire to be your life’s work.

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