Coming to college, it's hard not to hear "Welcome! We hope you have yourself totally figured out because you're going to need to know exactly what you want to do and how you are going to do it. Also, this thing that you do needs to get you a good job and make you lots of money."
When I was about five years old, I wanted to write and illustrate children's books when I grew up. Years later, here I am, in college, majoring in art and minoring in creative writing to make that possible.
The amount of people who believe that what a child dreams about at five continues to be what they dream about into adulthood is shockingly small. Because of this, I am very well informed on how impractical it is to aspire to be a writer or an artist or even both. For a long time I had in my head that the people who did things that were practical were smart. The more people I talk to ,and the more time I spend in school, I realize that there really is no one method to determine if someone is smart. Some people are brilliant but do not get good grades, others have all A’s but sad SAT scores. I would like to believe that the really intelligent people in this world are the creators, the ones who may even ignore the precision of the universe around them and completely immerse themselves into the depths of their own minds to make something new.
Humans, as a whole, seem to struggle with the question of whether or not what they do in this life serves any real purpose. As I get older, I am starting to realize that everything that we do has a purpose. Every person has value, and if you love something, then it also has value. Who cares if what you do is "practical" or not?
So for those people who question what they love: don't. Do what you love no matter how cheesy it sounds. Study what you want because you are never going to have a buffet of professors and classes at your disposal like this ever again. I would so much rather get out of college and feel like I grew as a person and learned something instead of feeling like I was guaranteed a specific job. Yes, a job would be nice, but for me, it just seems like the minimum. I want a job, but I want to do so much more than that. I want to go on adventures. So I'm going to work hard and try to make something of myself, but hopefully I will get to the point where my only task is to write and paint worlds to explore.
