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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I was also fed the neurotic assurance in high school that if I expected any success in life, I needed to go through a prestigious university degree. Ironically, it was around the time year twelve started that I began to take it with a grain of salt. So screw that, I was skipping classes and continuing to pursue acting, thank you very much. I got a great drama result and with no effort whatsoever, average results in my other classes. I would have enjoyed learning about my other subjects had they been remotely about learning rather than grades, standards, exams and beating each other out.
It’s quite a logical thing when you think about it. You see so many thirty or forty or fifty year olds coming to acting for the first time, or whatever career it is they discarded when they were younger. No financial reward or as you said, societal cred, has made up for what they didn’t do. You can’t cheat yourself like that.
I’m finding myself already broke to the point of embracing free meals where I can, getting the disapproving looks and comments when I say I’m an actor (“Oh, you’re going to be a movie star? Right…” “No, actually. I’m an actor.”) and occasionally wishing for some kind of secure path forward. But at the end of the day, I’m beyond glad to the point of almost relieved that I escaped the brainwashed notions of what to do with my life. It’s all an experiment., not a formulated secret to the correct end.
If I quit my job today, be it on your head.
Katherine: That whole “Ohhh, so you want to be a mooovie star!” thing is so irksome. Fame is incidental. It’s not like you pick up a copy of New Idea one day, thumb through the red carpet pics and think “That looks like fun; I’ll be an actor!” (Well, maybe some people do… this whole “wanting fame for fame’s sake” is such a weird phenomenon.)
I remember telling my year 10 careers adviser that I wanted to be an actor, and him giving me a look that was equal parts incredulity, pity and amusement. After that, I would always qualify my aspirations with some kind of self-deprecating remark. “I know it’s a total cliche,” I’d say, “but I want to perform.” Who cares if it’s a cliche, or difficult, or mega competitive? You could say that about a heap of different career paths.
And you’re right: life is just one big crazy experiment. Let’s light the bunsen burner and get fired up!
Jayce: All care, no responsibility. But that only applies if something bad happens. In the inevitable event of your raging success, I will claim full credit for inspiring you.
That’s great advice Ella, people shouldn’t do what is expected of them just to impress their parents/teachers/friends, they should do something because they love to do it. Kinda obvious really, but funny how many people hate their job. Especially those people who work all day in cubicles and complain they feel like the ants that the fat cats are stepping all over…do something about it!! Anyway, as the saying goes “Nobody on their deathbed wished they spent more time at the office”.