I am a film and English major. Ah, I love it. I’ll say it again. I am a film and English major.
Last semester I wasn’t. Last semester I was a journalism major. The semester before that I was a psychology major. I never thought that’d I’d be one to change my major, not even once. When I was 14, I was dead set on going to college to be a sports psychologist. I thought that I had it all figured out before the rest. But with that said, I have still always had this feeling in the back of my mind of wanting to be that person in the movies. I have always loved when a good song or a movie says exactly how I feel. I was actually inspired to be a sports psychologist because of the television show called “Necessary Roughness.” The opening line in every episode is “The minefields of life never go away …We just get better at navigating our way through them.” I loved that. I loved that line so much. The adversity in life never goes away. The battle of discovery who you are and who you want to be never goes away. We just get better at navigating our way through it. I realize now that the reason I loved this television show was because it made me feel something special. It made me feel like I could do anything I wanted to and that I could somehow someday have an impact on other people’s lives. Dr. D had the ability to change TK’s life with her words, and this concept was incredibly fascinating to me. I want to build a career around this feeling. I want it more than anything else.
I thought that I wanted to impact athlete’s lives. My plan was that I was going to play D1 volleyball somewhere. I would get a degree in sports psychology. I wanted to become a sports psychologist so that I could be a phenomenal coach someday, and then I could impact athlete’s lives by teaching them more about the game of life than the game of volleyball. I took a few psychology classes and realized that I did not really care about the science behind it all. I care a lot about how people feel. I care so much about what inspires people to do the things that they do. I decided that I did not want to study brain chemistry, I wanted to study life chemistry.
I am a passionately creative person, and I want to live my life on a big scale. I am now a film and English major. In one of my English classes, we talked about what it’s like to be an English major in a world that favors calculated logistics. We read an essay by William Edmundson about this feeling. He said, “To me an English major is someone who has decided, against all kinds of pious, prudent advice and all kinds of fears and resistances, to major, quite simply, in becoming a person.” While I think everyone’s major is intrinsically unique and important, a film and English major is hard to conceptualize.
So people ask me questions. They ask me what I want to do.
I want to do a lot of things, but I do not answer these questions with what I want to do. I tell them what I am going to do.
I am going to write movies and produce them. I will create stories and tell them to the world. I am all in. I want it more than anything else, and I am confident that I will find success in following my passion. It took me three majors to finally get comfortable saying what I’m going to do in my life. I have known all along that I wanted to constantly feel emotion. I encourage you all to listen to yourself if you have a lingering feeling in the back of your mind. I’ve always known that I wanted to have an impact on people’s lives, and I figured out the career path that my heart wants because of trial and error of taking college courses that turned out to be failures. By discovering what I hate, I became more connected to what I love. I love to write. I love to live and turn these experiences and feelings into words. I cannot image a more humbling feeling than being able to affect someone else’s life based off of the words that come from my mind. I want to create stories that will change people’s perspectives and make them feel a feeling that they have never felt before. I am going to be a screenwriter. If this last statement turns out to never be true, I will be okay. I will be okay because I gave it everything in my heart to make it happen.
It won’t be easy, and I don’t want easy. It is highly unattainable, and I embrace the adversity that lies ahead. But I am smart. I am passionate. I am creative. I am the girl that is going to go for it. Be the girl that goes for it.