Over the past few days, I’ve met a lot of new people and have consequently been asked several times about my education and my plans for the future. Unfortunately, my education has nothing to do with how my life is going right now and my plans for the future consist of a lot of wishful thinking. Every question concerning my college experience and how it will apply to my life when I finally grow up brings on a new wave of anxiety. Did I make the right decision when I chose my college? Will my four years at St. John’s ever be anything more to me than a lesson in human interaction? All those books I read, what do they have to do with me?
This isn’t a new struggle, but a daily debate that I’ve had with myself since I began college in January 2006. I always knew that I wanted to go to St. John’s because that’s the school where the kids only read books and talk about them all day. No tests, no grades, no lectures. All discussion-based classes taught not by professors but by the authors of the books themselves – meaning us kids read the works of the great authors of Western culture and then went to class and tried to figure out what it all meant. This was right up my alley.
When I started school I thought I would come out the other side an accomplished writer, ready to tackle the big news stories, travel around the world and tell people how it really is. Unfortunately, the longer I was in college, the more I hated everything that I wrote. My style has not changed one bit since high school, and every word that I write is like pulling teeth. After I decided against a job in journalism, I floated about aimlessly for a while and had frequent anxiety attacks from thinking about the future and how unsure I was of everything.
Without even noticing it, I became intensely interested in hats (working in a hat store may have had something to do with it). I started really caring about my part-time job, to the point that I would skip classes to take more shifts if I was needed, I quit my internship at the local newspaper in order to work more at the store over the summer after my junior year, and my boyfriend and I talked shop all the time when we hung out. I started a blog about hats, drew designs for hats during class, and would often ask my manager to schedule me an extra day to clean the entire store. I trained new employees, took on new responsibilities without being asked, helped my boyfriend pick out hats for the new season, and I was my manager’s right-hand-man.
By the time I was almost ready to graduate, I cared much more about hats than I did about reading Freud or Melville or Einstein. I had a mentor in the millinery world and she was going to help me make my first hat. I was going to get a full time job in Annapolis and save up money to take millinery classes in Chicago and Nashville. I was going to meet milliners from all over the country and eventually one of them would let me apprentice with them. I would be be a successful hat-maker and live happily ever after.
Only none of those things happened. I live at home with my parents, I have a little part time job at a local retail store and I will soon be substitute teaching to make more money. I spend most of my time in the library looking for better jobs in my area and feeling sorry for myself. What happened to me?
My plans were derailed by the incident at the hat store, but I’m still going to get back on track. I’m going to stick with this little retail job and I’m going to substitute teach whenever I can. I’m going to save every little bit of money so that when a room opens up in my friend’s apartment in December, I’ll be able to afford to move back to Annapolis. I’ll start applying for jobs in Annapolis as soon as November arrives and I will find something that pays enough to live on. I’ll be back where I love to live and I’ll start saving even more money so that I take millinery classes. I’ll get in touch with my hat-making mentor and get that hat made. I’ll visit my school friends and go out for drinks and be sociable. I’ll be happy and hard-working and goal-oriented. That’s the plan.
