So, this is what I do

After a good deal of thought and a tremendous amount of soul searching, I have come to the conclusion that the absolute best form of occupation for me would be to become a writer. I came to this conclusion after good, hard look at my skills and interests, and realized they would best be utilized under aforementioned profession.

And also by taking the advice of one of my university professors, “Don’t think about what you want to be when you grow up, think about what you want to do when you grow up.”

In other words, don’t pursue a particular occupation because you want to be that thing.  It could very well turn out that that thing is not something you want to do at all.

Take, for instance, being a doctor.  How many kids have you heard say they want to be doctors when they grow up?  When I was in high school, I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up.  Why not?  It’s a respectable profession.  You can make good money.  I like weird stuff like AIDS and Ebola.  But there were two things I never considered: 

1. Why I thought I would like being a doctor.  

2.  What being a doctor entails.

Now I thought I knew the answer to number two.  I knew all about how hard you have to study and all about the MCAT and what you need to do to get into a good medical school.  I was fine with that.  I was willing to put forth the effort and I like learning stuff. But as I began to pursue this career, I realized something horrible.  First, most pre-medical students do not want to learn, they want to memorize. In fact, many of the classes required to get into medical school test you on how much you’ve memorized.  To be fair, that’s partly because some of those classes are so large.  But based on my observation, many pre-medical students are not concerned so much about scientific inquiry as they are with what they need to memorize for the next exam.

And that attitude really started to bother me.

There I was, sitting in a class with mostly pre-medical students and I realized that there was a fundamental difference between them and myself.

I was there because I wanted to be there.  I was there because I wanted to know more about a particular subject.  I was there because I liked asking questions.  I was there because I wanted to understand a particular process, not just memorize the steps.  Trust me, there is a difference.

I remember my Comparative Anatomy professor once asked me if I majoring in Biology because I wanted to be a doctor, and I remember the shock on his face when I told him that I was majoring in Biology because I liked the subject.

But most of my peers were there because it was a means to an end.  They were there because they had to be.  Few were there because they were genuinely interested in the class.

And I know this happens in other career-oriented majors.  I took an Economics course as an elective and the same mindset was present among the business students as well.  They were there for the degree, not the education.

I have a friend who majored in Communication and encountered the same attitude in his classes.

I have witnessed the same in my English major acquaintances who plan on becoming career writers.

And I started to get a bit bummed out by it.

That was when I started to think about whether or not I wanted to do this whole medicine thing.  I liked learning; I liked science; I didn’t really like the mindset of the people who would be my colleagues or of the people who would be determining whether or not I was qualified to study Medicine.  I didn’t really like the fact that I would have to submit myself to a bureaucratic system.  I didn’t like the fact that I would be having insurance companies telling me how to treat my patients.  I didn’t like the fact that I would have patients telling me how to treat them, or the fact that I would have to constantly be on guard for malpractice suits, or be constantly subjugated to government rules, regulations, standards, practices, ethics, or any other committee that would determine how I could practice medicine.

Not that those are bad things, I just have problems complying with a ridiculous amount of regulations.

Which is one reason why writing would be good for me: I will not be working under anyone’s authority but my own.  At least, more so than I would in other professions.

This is when I really started to take my professor’s advice to heart.  I sat down and thought of all the things that I’m good at, I like doing, and the conditions under which I would be willing to work/live.  I came up with the following:

1.  I am generally unhappy when I have to work under someone else, especially when that someone else not as well informed about my job as I am.  (Imagine, for a moment, that you are a scientist trying to save an endangered species and then this group of people who know absolutely nothing about science or your work comes along and un-endanger your species.  Oh wait, this has happened before. See what I mean?)

2.  I am pretty good at applying things I’ve learned in weird ways.

3.  I enjoy writing things.  Be it an essay, a blog, or a work of fiction.  But not poetry.  Poetry can go fuck itself.

4.  I know the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect.’

5.  I am fascinated by the use and origin words, languages, and their rules.

6.  I like spying on people.

7.  I usually have whiskey and cigarettes hidden around my house somewhere.

8.  I am used to not having money.

9.  I read a lot.

10.  I’m good at lying.  And I mean that as both deception and assuming a horizontal resting position.  I do both quite often.  Sometimes simultaneously.

And having considered all these things, I realized what I really wanted to do was something I couldn’t achieve by simply going to a university and majoring in a certain thing.  It was something that I would have to create myself.  It was something that I could do regardless of what job I might hold.  One of the benefits of being a writer is that agents and editors don’t require you to spend years subjected to creative writing programs to become ‘qualified’ to create, they don’t ask for your university transcripts, or what your GPA was, or what professional certifications you hold, or, I don’t know, what your GRE/MCAT/LSAT/GMAT/whatever-other-tests-are-out-there scores.  Regardless of all the problems with which the publishing industry is currently riddled, there’s still one thing going for them:  It is what you finished, that they will look at, not whether or not you took the ‘proper’ steps to get there.

Which gives me the freedom to pursue an education in the sciences and make up shit people will never read.  It’s kind of nice to know no matter what job I might hold, I’ll always be doing what I want to be doing.  No one will make me stop writing.  And the funny thing is, if it hadn’t have been for that professor, I would have abandoned medicine and would now be frantically thinking of other things for me to be.  But now I don’t really care.  I know what I’ll be doing; anything else just helps pay the bills.