For about 48 hours, I wanted to be a doctor. High school had just ended, we had all received our final exam results, and to my complete surprise, the number printed on my piece of paper would have allowed me to enroll in medicine. The fact that I have a phobia of veins, fainted when I got my ears pierced and turn away during the operation scenes of ER suddenly seemed irrelevant. The important thing was that I would get to wear a lab coat, say “Stat!” and witness the signing of official documents like a total Important Person.
Truth is, I would have been a Doctor Nick-calibre physician. Just as I would have become a Lionel Hutz-style lawyer. So why in the name of justice did I eventually sign up for a combined law degree? Because I thought it would look impressive, and I didn’t want to “waste” my university entrance score.
You know what’s a waste? Spending years trudging through a degree that you don’t enjoy while wishing you had the courage to do what you really want to do. I squandered so much time at uni feeling embarrassed, outclassed and inferior because I just didn’t fit in at law school. At the time, I was still under the spell that is conjured at your average academically selective high school: that you will be worthless without a degree. Encumbered by visions of a life spent picking up highway rubbish with a blunt stick, I stumbled through my case readings and assignments, deleting and rewording every second sentence out of shame. I’d picture my lecturers reading my overdue, garbled essays and shaking their heads in disgust, wondering how someone like me could have slipped through the cracks and into their prestigious faculty.
After a while, standard procrastination gave way to a strategy of complete avoidance. I just stopped turning up to class. Convinced that I’d futzed up my future, I was too ashamed to approach anyone for help or admit that maybe crowded tutorials on the tort of negligence just weren’t my thing.
Compounding the guilt was the fact that I was on a scholarship. Those lovely big cheeses in charge of the purse strings had selected me as one of their future stars. And now I had run out of gas, and not even in the brilliantly dramatic supernova way. I just quietly faded. I wanted to disappear.
I never did graduate. I look back at my 19-year-old self and want to give her a good slap upside the head, but I also know that the period of fumbling and failure was inevitable and probably necessary. The wonderful thing about bombing out at uni was that it allowed me to finally realise what I want to do with my life. The answer — write; perform; make people laugh — may lack the societal cred and financial rewards of my initial career aspirations, but the soul-soothing sense of satisfaction is absolutely worth it.
My advice to anyone who is struggling with the low-prestige factor of their ideal career is this: think about how short life is. Think about how lucky you are to be able to choose how you spend that time. Now think about how annoyed you’ll be if you hit 85 and realise, mid-sip of your liquefied dinner, that the career you chose in order to impress other people has given you a lifetime of stress and unhappiness.
If there is something in your life that you always come back to — something that commands your heart and soul and feels akin to a long, languid sigh after a difficult day — then you need to find a way to be doing it as much as possible. Take the leap. Do what you love. It’s incredibly freeing.
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