Well, today I've been working on school stuff. NO!!! It's barely August and I'm working on school stuff? It's follow up to my internship. Don't worry, I haven't had a complete personality shift and become one of those people who reads their books for class the summer before or gets good grades or something. No, I'll always be a barely average slacker, no worries there.
Self-deprecation aside, I've been wondering if I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Not just today as I've been typing up patient histories and wishing I could play Mass Effect instead but other times too. When I started out at Houghton I had a religion major because I figured that, as far as God goes, you can't get in too much trouble majoring in Him. But within half a semester I desperately missed writing and I was getting very sick of boring facts about the Old Testament and I had failed/dropped Biblical Greek. So the study of religion was, by and large, out of my future and I went back to my first love: Writing.
Psychology had always interested me, plus I wanted an excuse to take Human Sexuality and Abnormal Psychology, so I decided to minor in it. Up until this past semester I was very satisfied with focusing on writing and having psychology as a hobby. But then I started counting credits. I had already taken the majority of writing classes that Houghton offered and more than enough for my major so I wasn't sure what I would do my senior year. Until I realized that I had just enough room to squeeze in a psychology major on the applied pre-therapy track. This was exciting not only because psychology is cool and really interesting to me, but because it meant that I might graduate with an actual hireable degree and keep me from living in a cardboard box after college.
Due to my psych major I spent a large portion of this summer as a psychology major at the Acadia Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Bangor that's about a 20 minute walk from my house. It was a really cool experience and when I first started I felt all fired up and was like "YES! This is what I'll do for the rest of my life. I'll be a psychotherapy super hero!" But by the middle of the summer, and definitely by the end, I was less sure. I don't know if I have the patience or endurance for a career in psychology. I think I would definitely burn out by either getting too impatient or getting too emotionally involved with my clients. Honestly, I think I might be too much of a softy for that kind of work. I don't know. Also, I think I may be too wimpy for the classwork. This coming semester I will be exclusively taking psychology classes. Honestly, they all look hard, and I'm only really interested in one.
So I feel kind of torn. My temptation is to drop the psych major, change all my hard, core psych classes for next semester to easy, fun, and random classes, and to spend the rest of my life as a starving artist living off my writing/becoming the next David Foster Wallace (not like, I'm not that good.) The only problem is that I'm getting married. If I wasn't getting married I would feel no responsibility to grow up, get a job, mature, or be responsible at all. But I do.
I guess I should just stick with my psych major. It's the practical thing to do. It's also really hard work and I would hate to fail a class. I mean, if I do then I have to drop the psych major.
Anyway, for the few people still reading this blog I guess you've figured out that I've got my angst back so I'm writing again. It's been a while since I wrote anything with zero conclusion, meaning, or decisiveness. But here I go. I think I'm enjoying getting back into it.
No comments:
Post a Comment