You know, I’ve lurked here for years. I’ve only got 300-some posts, so I’m rather faceless amongst the crowd, but I feel as though I’ve known all of you for so very long. In a way, it’s as though I’m a peeping tom and I’ve grown overly fond of my voyeuristic victims. So do forgive me for pouring my heart out like this; though I’m a stranger to you, you’re all dear friends to me in a strange way.
I graduated from college this past Saturday with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. It should have been a happy thing, but it wasn’t. At first, I thought it was the ceremony itself that had me down. My father died last July and he had wanted so very badly to be there to see me graduate. One of his final requests was for me to keep a bit of his ashes from being buried so that a small part of him could be there with me when I turned my tassel. So I sat on the football field at the University of Georgia last weekend, being congratulated on my accomplishments, turning my father’s keepsake urn over in my hands and trying not to cry. It didn’t work then, and it’s not working now.
But as that day passed, I realized that it wasn’t my father’s simultaneous presence and absence that had me down. It was the fact that I had this fucking albatross of a degree hanging around my neck. Yeah, I like sociology. It’s interesting. Balloon animals are interesting, too, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life making them, either. Going around trying to find a job in my field for the past few months has had me feeling like shit, and now I know why. It wasn’t because I was having fuckall luck – it was because I didn’t want to do that crap in the first place.
I changed my major to sociology just after my sophomore year at college. Before that, I had been pre-med/biotechnology. I was a fine student at first, but during the second half of my sophomore year my grades began to slide. I didn’t know what to think at first – I had always been a good student, but more and more I was becoming disengaged from my classes, finding it impossible to become motivated to study or even get out of bed. Later, I would find out that this was around the time I was just starting to experience major depressive disorder, but at the time I thought I was just somehow becoming more and more useless. I got very down on myself, gave up my pre-med ambitions, and fell into sociology. It’s an interesting major, but it ain’t exactly challenging, and that’s why I picked it.
I tried and tried and tried to convince myself that sociology was truly what I wanted to do, and I damn near succeeded. I spent a year on antidepressants and in therapy, and I started to feel better about myself. Then my dad was diagnosed with cancer of the lung and brain on May 10th, 2007. It was my parents’ thirty-second wedding anniversary, and his birthday was three days later. He died July 29th. By the end, he didn’t know my or anyone else’s name, nor could he speak. He died in pain, literally screaming in agony, surrounded by his loved ones. That was a hell of a time to come off of my antidepressants, and I was on shaky ground for a while. My grades weren’t as good as I wanted them to be, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t come out of UGA with a 3.5 GPA.
My senior year passed with little incident. I just wanted to get the hell out of college. And I did get out, and I’ve been out for six days now. But it was yesterday that did it in.
I was driving to visit my mother in Alabama, where she had moved after my dad died. The weather was horrible and my mood was worse. My job search was (and is) going poorly, and I was once again going over in my mind all of the different options I could explore. And then it just hit me. Not one of the things I was thinking of was something I wanted to do, nor would it ever lead me to something I wanted to do. I had had one dream for years, and no matter how hard I had tried to deny it or bury it or forget about it, it was the same one I had when I came to college. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor, not a social worker, not a juvenile probation/parole specialist, a d-o-c-t-o-r doctor.
It hit me then how hard I had really been trying to fool myself into thinking sociology was truly what I wanted to do, without even really trying to do it. It hit me then that I had had one dream for this long and I had ignored it. And most importantly of all, it hit me then that I was going to regret denying that dream for the rest of my life.
Rain was coming down, I was driving down the road crying like a child who had just watched his entire family and puppy get hit by a blimp piloted by Hitler, and I realized then and there that I was at a crossroads. I hadn’t thought about it, but for the past few days little unintentional self-destructive thoughts had been crawling through my mind. In sudden clarity, I recognized them for what they were – my therapist had called them suicidal ideation. Not actual thoughts of suicide, not a true desire to off myself, but little ideas like “God, it would be easier just to shoot myself than deal with this.” Things I had thought hundreds of time a day every day that I was depressed. So I realized I had a choice – try to make my dream come true, or spend the rest of my life alternating between wishing I had and wishing for death.
So I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I am. I don’t care what it takes, who I have to beg, I’m going to do it. I’m going to take classes at night to get my organic chemistry grades up. I’m going to study biology, physics, and chemistry to blow the MCAT out of the fucking water. I’m going to try and parlay my experience into a tech job at a hospital somewhere around here. I’m going to volunteer or work part-time at the Hospice in town, both to give back to them for how they helped my family and to – to be honest – look better on an application.
I don’t know how, but I’m going to become a doctor, and nothing is going to stand in my way. It’s my dream, and I would rather die than not chase it.
oh god I’m scared oh god I’m scared oh god I’m scared
But it’s hard for me because I spent 4 years getting a degree in psychology…and to suddenly switch tracks makes me feel like I wasted my time.
) and development - lots of that applies to animals without even anthropomorphizing them. Think of all you learned about yourself - from your first freshman laughably wrong self-diagnosis to your senior year genuine insights.