A standard for people to aspire to

    I got my Associates in Science in 2019. Before that, I was in college for six years. I remember it being fun for the first few years, but the longer it went on, the harder it got to fight the sense that I was marching towards eternal doom. Every teacher I’d met since about high school talked about how smart they thought I was, and let me tell you, when you’re smart, people think that you should be doing things for the benefit of society, things like being a scientist, or a businessperson, or really any sort of person who works with numbers.

   I hated that so much.

   Chemistry was fascinating, parts of the math were interesting, and I still find myself fascinated by computer science, but mostly I was just thinking, “This is the rest of my life, working for someone else and hoping to god they don’t figure out that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. The only way I can live in this world is to do what somebody else wants me to do the rest of my life with no input of my own, ever.”

    Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit. Or rather, I stopped passing any of my classes. Let me tell you, it’s hard to pay attention to a subject when all you can think is, “I don’t want to do this anymore” especially when the course load is so high you can only keep going if you pay attention to two of your courses at a time. When it became clear that I couldn’t keep going in college, I was so relieved. I finally had a good excuse to just be done with it all. My mother didn’t see it that way. But by that point, I’d gotten used to the idea that we wouldn’t see eye to eye.

   What kept me going through that awful time was art. Specifically, the people I follow on the internet. To me, there are two kinds of art, the kind that rich people say we’re supposed to like, and the kind most of us actually enjoy. I prefer the latter. I think that the kind of art most people enjoy, the simple, straightforward, undetailed art we love when we think no ones watching, has a lot more societal significance than anything that gets put on cliffs notes. If only because you can look at that sort of art, and think “I could do that, I could absolutely make that sort of art if I wanted to.”

   One of the things I like about this blog is that I can make that sort of art, and there’s every possibility that someone who’s in the position I was in a few years ago can look at my blog and go “I can write posts like this. I can write stories like that. Even if I don’t get a job people consider useful, I can still contribute to society.” That thought, honestly, has made me feel so much better. Maybe I’m not a great writer, but that doesn’t mean I can’t inspire the next great writer. 

   I got my Associates in Science in 2019. Before that, I was in college for six years. I remember it being fun for the first few years, but the longer it went on, the harder it got to fight the sense that I was marching towards eternal doom. Every teacher I’d met since about high school talked about how smart they thought I was, and let me tell you, when you’re smart, people think that you should be doing things for the benefit of society, things like being a scientist, or a businessperson, or really any sort of person who works with numbers.

   I hated that so much.

   Chemistry was fascinating, parts of the math were interesting, and I still find myself fascinated by computer science, but mostly I was just thinking, “This is the rest of my life, working for someone else and hoping to god they don’t figure out that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. The only way I can live in this world is to do what somebody else wants me to do the rest of my life with no input of my own, ever.”

    Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit. Or rather, I stopped passing any of my classes. Let me tell you, it’s hard to pay attention to a subject when all you can think is, “I don’t want to do this anymore” especially when the course load is so high you can only keep going if you pay attention to two of your courses at a time. When it became clear that I couldn’t keep going in college, I was so relieved. I finally had a good excuse to just be done with it all. My mother didn’t see it that way. But by that point, I’d gotten used to the idea that we wouldn’t see eye to eye.

   What kept me going through that awful time was art. Specifically, the people I follow on the internet. To me, there are two kinds of art, the kind that rich people say we’re supposed to like, and the kind most of us actually enjoy. I prefer the latter. I think that the kind of art most people enjoy, the simple, straightforward, undetailed art we love when we think no ones watching, has a lot more societal significance than anything that gets put on cliffs notes. If only because you can look at that sort of art, and think “I could do that, I could absolutely make that sort of art if I wanted to.”

   One of the things I like about this blog is that I can make that sort of art, and there’s every possibility that someone who’s in the position I was in a few years ago can look at my blog and go “I can write posts like this. I can write stories like that. Even if I don’t get a job people consider useful, I can still contribute to society.” That thought, honestly, has made me feel so much better. Maybe I’m not a great writer, but that doesn’t mean I can’t inspire the next great writer.