Choose Your Own Adventure

Recently, I've been ever-so-slightly lamenting the course of study I've pursued in my collegiate education. It seems it would have been a lot more practical if I had just chosen some sort of professional track that led to a specific career. This dawned on me with particular umph as I realized I was jealous of those friends and relatives of mine who are in the first years of teaching. They are somewhere. Their education has yielded certain fruits. Specifically, a classroom over which they have dominion.

I guess I sort of had that professional-track thing going on when I was an aspiring journalist tearing up the editorial scene at BYU (by tearing it up I mean writing mediocre pieces and getting people's names wrong, that's a GFE, my friends, a gross factual error). But I didn't like that, I truly didn't. And I don't really look back on withdrawing from all my journalism classes part way through the semester with regret. In fact, I am kind of proud of those W's marring my transcript. Because for me, it took new insight and courage to realize that a piece of paper didn't matter as much as doing what really felt right for me. Blah, blah, blah. It was really profound stuff.

But now, I find myself with diploma in hand, thinking it will give me direction and realizing that it is not actually a map. Career counselors like to tell you that there is a wide berth of opportunities for enterprising young humanities majors to seize. But I remember the only employer advertising on the "Opportunities in Humanities" bulletin board the one time I looked at it was Enterprise Rent-a-Car, which is a nice company, my uncle works for them, but he was a business major. It was sort of a taunting flier; it seemed to be saying "So you looked at your paintings and read your stories, now come to the real world."

I'm sure a number of people who got their elementary education degree feel a bit like I do, like they don't know where they're going (despite their degree did provide some sort of linear progression, with a clear objective). I feel like I am in a choose your own adventure book. I read a couple of those back in the day, or maybe I just read one a couple of times. It's hard to be sure. I remember being a Japanese schoolgirl caught in the middle of some kind of samurai feud or something. But I remember dying prematurely, probably on a machete blade. I wasn't a good decision-maker. Or I just made dangerous decisions. But I don't regret them, it was just a book.

I guess this is just life. It's not quite as dramatic as samurai vendettas. So making the more adventurous decision, the one that strikes my fancy the most, won't be my death. And I mean, if I really want to see what life would be like being the supreme ruler of 30' by 30' space in some high school, I could go back and see how that storyline would progress. But for now, I'll continue to trudge through this because, despite that I have no idea where it is going to take me, I'm still thinking it will yield a better story.