We all knew what we wanted to be what we grew up when we were six. Adults always asked us that question. First, I wanted to be a cat. Then, I wanted to be a veterinarian, because if I couldn’t be a cat, then at least I could work with cats all day. After that, I wanted to be a movie star. A childhood of laziness crushed that dream, but that’s beside the point.

The point is, it was so much easier to decide what you wanted to do with your life when you had absolutely no concept of how difficult it is to actually be an adult in this day and age. Now that I’m hitting senior status next semester with a major change and no internships to brag about, I’m here to say that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing with my life.

I wish I could say “that’s okay,” but let’s be real: we live in a society that expects you to know what you want to do upon high school graduation and graduate from a university in four years. If you can do that, you’re hot stuff. So I can’t confidently say that it’s okay, but…maybe it is okay.

When I transferred to my university, I had a plan.

I mean, I had to have a plan. I was moving three hours away from the town I had lived my entire life, and I was convinced that I was meant to major in publishing studies and be an editor. Two semesters into my college experience, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I was ready to force myself into more “practical” skills like copyediting and publishing production because I’ve been told over and over again that I have no chance of getting a “creative job” because A) I haven’t been doing creative extracurriculars my whole life and B) when you want a creative job, it’s “about who you know, not what you know.” After a long contemplation, I decided that if something was going to prevent me from getting a “real job,” I’d rather it be because I received stellar grades in something “artsy,” not because I received crappy grades in something “practical.”

This brought about the major change.

I went from “publishing” to “general English.” You couldn’t make a degree sound vaguer if you tried, but I knew it was the right thing to do for me. My skills aren’t practical, and I’m still learning to accept that society is probably not going to see me as worthy for this reason. I’m not good at math. I’m not good at science. Sometimes I’m not even that great at simple copyediting tasks.

But hand me a book for middle schoolers and I’ll give you a full analysis with a thesis statement and cited sources. Give me a film project assignment and I’ll draft a decent screenplay within a few hours. Let me write short stories for my honors projects, and you’ll be amazed at how much I know. I’m good at English. I’m good at creative writing, at analyzing children’s literature, at understanding Shakespeare. And no, I don’t plan on “teaching high school” with that degree. You literally can’t teach anything below college level without an education degree.

The truth is, I have no idea what I want to do with my degree.

I’m only six classes away from graduating, and I’m drawing blanks as to what I can do with a general English degree and a film studies minor without “the right connections” or millions of years of experience in creative fields. And maybe that’s okay. My success is not determined by my ability to have a career figured out fresh out of college.