I was startled by the sound of a sharp bang! In my ghost-like phase, I had knocked over a glass bottle which shattered to a million pieces on the tile floor beneath me. Yet, the sound barely awoke me. My vision remained foggy, and the sounds around me returned to a simple dullness, like someone stuffed cotton swabs into my ears.
Before me laid an array of papers with gibberish scribbled all across. The penmanship appeared like it belonged to a kindergartener, and drawings of what were supposed to be molecules were nothing more than faint scribbles. The information I struggled so hard to cram into my brain was nowhere to be found, as if the memory sector had gone into overdrive. I let out a deep sigh and packed my bags. This was it. This was the last of it. I was done.
I walked into my chemistry class the next day, deciding that this was going to be last science course I ever had to take during my time at UCI. I finished the final exam, trotted down the outrageously steep steps of the lecture hall (nearly fell because I felt woozy from the sleep deprivation), and turned in the thick yellow packet with a ridiculous grin on my face.
Five minutes later, I called my mom to tell her what I had done.
“You’re crazy,” she told me.
“The best grade I’ll end up with in that class is a D,” I responded. “Maybe.”
I could basically hear her jaw drop across the phone line. She started lecturing me about the dim prospect of my future and how I would never get into medical school with a D on my transcript, but all this went in one ear and out the next.
“I don’t really know what I’m going to do next,” I said. And honestly, I had no clue. I was about to enter my second year of college without direction, but for the first time, I felt perfectly fine with no plan, no blueprint, and no timeline set out for me.
The anxiety started to settle in after the initial adrenaline rush washed away. Now what should I do? The following quarter, I enrolled in a calculus class and finished that course with a D-. OK… so maybe math is not for me. The next quarter, I tried out a beginner history course which resulted in a C-. OK… maybe history is not for me either. Another economics course slapped my transcript with a C- the following round of classes. I kept hitting and I kept missing, and suddenly, I never felt more lost.
Somewhere along the way, my motivation wilted. How was I supposed to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life at the age of 19? My parents were breathing down my neck. “What are you going do?” “Why haven’t you decided?” “Still not too late to be a doctor!”
My frustrations began to boil over, so I sat down, opened a word document and typed. I typed furiously away, pouring my frustrations out and asking others about their sentiments as well. A story formed out of that mess somehow. I haphazardly published it onto the internet at 3 a.m. on a random night, expecting no replies. But people found it relatable, and suddenly, I was receiving responses from the strangers who understood how crappy my college experience had been up to that point.
I thought to myself, writing? When I entered the university, I had honestly brushed away the entire humanities department because I believed in the false notion that I could never be “successful” from it. But I knew I was a writer; I always was. And it made me happy. The creativity, the mystery, and how it allowed me to communicate in ways speech could never comprehend appealed to me. Why didn’t I do it, then? Write stories about people, write stories about myself, travel and learn?
It started with that one chemistry class, the one that caused so much agony and frustration but I could never be more grateful for it. I declared myself a Literary Journalism and International Studies double major within the next year, and I could not be more ecstatic to have found my little niche at UCI. And as sappy it sounds, “failing” chemistry, and subsequently the calculus, history, and economics classes… was one of the best things to ever happen to me.
Point of the story: Chase after your passions, but if you are a klutz like me, you'll trip a few times getting there.
(“You can write, honey,” Mom later said. “But marry a doctor.”)
