“Major in something useful.”

“You won’t be able to feed yourself.”

“How are you going to support a family on that?”

“You’d better marry rich.”

I heard from my own family members in seventh grade that social work wasn’t right for me, that I had the brain to go into medicine or law. I heard things along the lines of “I have friends who are social workers, and they struggle to pay their bills.” “I saw a lady doing this today and I thought to myself, ‘this is really cool, Annabelle could do this.’” and while I appreciated your enthusiasm for my mental capabilities, I need to remind the world about some things.

Here I am, six years later and more driven than ever to do the exact same thing with my life that I wanted to when I was twelve. Okay, I might still go to law school, after I’ve been a social worker, after I’ve gotten a deeper understanding of how the system works, because then I’ll need an even better understanding of how to change it. I’ll need a better understanding of how to get people to listen to me so that I can enact that change. I don’t want to make money. I want to make a difference.

I didn’t grow up with a lot of money, I’ve been taught to live below my means because you never know what’s going to happen. You know what I did grow up with, though? Empathy, and generosity, and yes- Social Workers. A lot of my earliest memories take place in foster care, people don’t expect that from me because I live with half of the family that I was born into. A lot of people don’t expect that from me, because I’ve never stepped foot in a Juvenile Detention Center. A lot of people don’t expect that from me because when they ask where I’m from I tell them Sharon Springs, Kansas. I moved to Sharon Springs, Kansas when I was eight years old, and before that, I had been to eight different elementary schools and lived in at least eleven different houses/apartments. To this day I have little to no problems remembering formulas and thorems, but I still add and multiply with the help of my fingers, because I missed a math class or seventeen in second and third grade.

This isn’t about how I grew up though, this is about me wanting to help other families and other children who don’t understand why they’re growing up that way. Five year old me didn’t understand what a divorce was, Five year old me understood that my mom was in my life nearly every day until all of a sudden, she wasn’t. Five year old me understood that it was my job to take care of my baby brother until all of a sudden, the foster care system took him away from me. Five year old me understood that I was supposed to be grateful that I was being given back to my dad in the middle of the night and that we were going to go pick up my baby brother from the children’s home he had been placed in the same day I was moved to a foster home in which my new foster mother didn’t speak english. Eighteen year old me understands that there are two sides to every story, and eighteen year old me understands that the children’s side is rarely heard.

18-year-old me is working to ensure that twenty-nine year old me will remember what it feels like to be cheated out of an early childhood by a system which doesn’t take her into consideration. Eighteen year old me is taking every blow to her ego with her chin held high because I’ve been making decisions for myself way too long to let “grown ups” make them for me again. I have no doubt that every comment about my idea of a future came with my best interests at heart. I know that I’m not the only one who’s received comments like this. I have a countless number of friends working toward art-based majors who hear similar comments, and I know that the majority of these friends want to do so much more than paint all day for the rest of their lives. Right now their urge is to create, to say something, but I know that in the future, they want to help people, like I do. I know that my friends want to help people say things that they can’t with their words. I know that my friends want to help people get through parts of their life that they don’t understand through pictures and color, because it makes more sense to draw a feeling than to talk about it. I have friends that spend all of their time outside of school painting murals who aspire to make public transportation easier and more effective.

But when people hear the base terms “art” or “socio” in reference to a career choice or major, they assume that the person speaking lacks the drive required to be a mathematician or doctor. We’re throwing our lives away, because working with people or buildings can’t possibly ever be as useful as working with corporations or computers.

I don’t mean to shame people who ask the wrong questions. I mean to urge you guys instead of asking why we’d want to throw our lives away, instead of asking why we’d want to work a base-wage job, why we’re wasting our talents; ask us what our plans are for the future, ask us what made us decide on this path in the first place. Don’t put us down for wanting to save the world, and keep in mind that the person you’re speaking to is an actual human being, who most likely wasn’t built to fit in the few boxes you’ve constructed to put people into.