If love is a labor, I'll slave 'till the end;

In the seventh grade, I wrote a short story about a girl that met her father for the first time. The rest of the plot isn’t really that important, and I honestly can’t remember what went through my mind that far back in time. I typed the entire thing into a word document, which may have consisted of 30 pages with very large font, and printed it out. I painted a cover on a piece of cardboard left over from extra boxes that were scattered around my house from moving two years prior, and tied all of the pages to it with string. The majority of my homeroom class, which was only a mere 15 people, passed it around and then congratulated me. This went on for about a week, until some girl stole it and I never saw it again. Later that year, I joined the newspaper club and began publishing random things I had written. Writing was a silly, childhood dream that I never thought would ever mean as much as it does to me now.

I just met with my fiction writing professor, who is impressed with the work that I just handed in. My last assignment is to revise what I’ve already written, and I was just told that my story has is huge - that is has great potential and that I should never stop working on it. I’m so happy with this, that words can not even begin to describe how I feel. I actually feel like I’m accomplishing something. Perhaps I might even be talented, as I’ve been told, but I won’t throw around that very honorable title and attach it to myself just yet. I just keep thinking, what if this goes further. What if I write something so great that it actually gets published. What if. What if. What if. I won’t daydream too much about it, because the chance of it happening is very slim, but the thought will always remain somewhere deep in the back of my mind.

I have a feeling that I have a bright future ahead of me, and I’ve honestly never felt this way about anything I’ve ever done. 

I’ve decided, with a lot of deliberation over the last few years (and in particular the last couple of months) that I want to go to grad school for English Education and be a high school English teacher. Yes, I’m going to school for something completely unrelated, but it’s not unheard of that people with bachelors degrees in psych go into teaching. Besides, I have an immense amount of English credits here. More than enough to declare it as a minor at least.

The thing is, whenever I tell someone about it and how excited I am, I get a pretty poor reaction. There are a few people that are happy for me and support me. But for the post part, I’m getting a face and a sigh. One friend even told me that I had better potential and have wasted my undergrad studying something irrelevant. (As I’ve learned over the past three years - you pay for an experience in undergrad. I’ve grown as a person and everything I’ve learned that has made me grow as a person has not been taught to me in a classroom). Better potential? To slave away at grad school for a degree I don’t want? To ignore what I have passion for? Okay then. 

Then, I get the old, “You’re going to be in debt forever. You’re not going to make any money.” Excuse me, but when did money become the primary drive for career choices? When was it decided that a salary defines a person’s quality of life? I know that I’m going to be spending a lot of time paying off debts, all right. I’ve known that my entire life. 

I just wish everyone would respect my choices and see how far I’ve come. I grew up in a trailer park for crying out loud and now I’m at Syracuse University and I want to be something that inspires people and could potentially change their lives. I want to talk about literature and how it applies to society and the human condition. I don’t want books to die because of technology. I want to be there for the adolescents with molding brains and uneasy emotions. I want to be that cool teacher that they can go to for anything, make lesson plans, and decorate my classroom in quotes from dead authors. I’m not going to be rich, but I’m going to be happy. So sue me.