We are young

“I don’t supposed there’s ever been so much repression of true feelings since Stalinist Russia.” -God Help the Girl (2014)

When I was little I had an immensely rich inner world. I don’t remember ever sleeping at night as a child, so I would spend hours making up adventures that I could live in. With my dolls my stories lasted weeks, they always had a beginning, middle, and end. I would write and color my own comic books and share them with my family. I was always creating something, even if it wasn’t related to stories. At the age of twelve I started writing them on the family computer and posting them on the website Figment (which sadly no longer exists).  In my early teens writing was the only part of my identity I could be proud of. Words helped me through the hardest times in my life, they helped my sort out my emotions and process what was happening to me and how I and the world around me was changing. When I graduated high school at the ripe age of eighteen, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up (well, at eighteen I thought I was grown up, little did I know that would later slap me in the face). I wanted to be a an author, and before I wrote my best selling novel I was going to support myself by being a middle school English teacher. I wished to be a person that I wish I had to help me in my writing endeavors and guide me in that time of life because it was the most confusing time for me.
I made up my mind that I wanted to teach English over seas, it didn’t matter much where, I just needed to be somewhere that felt other. I had only lived in a small community in Oklahoma, but deep down I always knew the world was too small for me, yet it was also too big for me not to go out into it.
Devastated, I didn’t end up getting into the college of my choice. I wasn’t a very impressive student, and to this day I am still mediocre, but that’s just fine. I took two gap years working, the only thing I was certain of at that time was the fact that I was going to go to college no matter what. Eventually God led to the way to a different school where I found my home and met my second family (aka my weird ass friends). Freshmen year I began majoring in Nutrition, at the end of the the first semester I changed it to Economic Development. I was passionate about these things, but they were not second nature to me. I struggled in the classes related to these majors and I couldn’t relate to any of my classmates. That is not to say that you have to fit in with people, but I knew I didn’t understand the material like they did. I spent hours in the classes wondering what the hell was going on. If I wanted to make a career in Nutrition or Economics I had to grasp the simple concepts and I just could not comprehend them. My grades in non major related courses were keeping me above ground, the low grades in my major courses were making me feel inadequate and during the spring I hit a mental low that shook me. A lot of people were telling me that this was how I was going to make it in the world, if I wanted something stable, if I wanted to make money I could only work in certain fields. I did care about these fields for more than just making money, I can find passion in almost anything, but they were just not right for me.
In freshmen year I took a poetry class and it unlocked something within me. Previously I maybe written three poems in my life; within a year of being awestruck by the literary world that had opened to me I had written over forty poems. Most of them are incomplete and utter shit, but they are all mine. I wrote shitty slam poetry in my Environmental Economics class, I would write stanzas about the people I saw around campus in my Business Math class. I would get my homework done (or ignore it) so I could write, as a form of procrastination, but also because every writer writes because they have to get the words out on paper.

Last week as I stared blankly at the chalk board in my math class, knowing how much of a moron I was for not understanding how to graph some bullshit number, I realized how much I had been denying myself. I was not a numbers person, I could not relate to them, I could not grasp their depth and meaning as I looked at them. Others could do that and I commended them, but that was not who I was. It was in that moment that I decided to change my major…again. This decision lead to clarity, but also doubt. People often think that only certain paths can lead to stability, but life itself is uncertain, and I might as well work toward something I can be proud of. I’ve talked to professors who had undergrad degrees that were in completely different fields than what they ended up doing with their careers. None of us have any idea what’s going on or how we’re going to get to from one point to another. I think some of the biggest assets to success are passion, drive, and excellence. I believe I have the first two, and I am constantly working toward the third.
The fact that I traveled so far and live on my own seems unreal, and at the same time it feels like a place I have lived my entire life, a place that was meant for me.
On Monday I am making the change and pursuing an English degree with a TESOL minor, hoping one day to level up to a professor. I might not make any money this way, you may never know my name as a New York Times best seller, but I will at least be making art that I can share with the world.

I hope you guys are having a good week and an excellent life.

-Tina.

p.s. dreams do come true.