Goodbye, English: What It’s Like To Fall Out of Love With Your Major

At the recent prompting of my advisor’s much-dreaded “it’s time to declare your major!” email, I was forced to confront what I had been avoiding for months: the fact that I no longer loved my major. I applied to Notre Dame as an English major simply because I loved my senior year English class; I had absolutely no other inkling of an academic interest beyond that. All of the other classes I took in high school were ehh. Math: ehh. History: ehh. Science: ehh. I didn’t hate them, exactly, but I didn’t love them, either, and I wanted to. English, though—that I loved. Or mostly loved. I had always been a reader; I couldn’t even fall asleep without reading a few pages of a book first. Writing, too, had always been a passion of mine; so what better major for me than English itself? 

As a tried and true perfectionist, I both loved and hated the immense challenge of finding the perfect combination of words to communicate something as flimsy as a thought. It didn’t matter if it was an email or a literary analysis essay—the satisfaction I felt after rearranging sentences and thesaurus-ing words (yes, I just made thesaurus-ing a verb) until I couldn’t anymore is what made all of the painful labor worth it. 

Through different writing projects over the years (one of which is a 68-page romance novel—more on that later), I found that writing (and all the work I put into it) could mean something besides satisfaction. As a freshman in high school struggling to come to terms with the fact that high school was nothing like High School Musical (who am I kidding, I don’t think I ever came to terms with it), I created a blog. Living Like a Jule (Jules is my favorite nickname) chronicled the revelations of an insecure, ambitious 15-year-old girl in various shades of teal and black, the only WordPress layout that was free. My only readers were a few very loyal friends; even so, I wrote as if I were the celebrated voice of wisdom every teenage girl needed in her life. I loved writing in this new, clear voice of mine; and I loved feeling needed, if only by myself. I had been feeling so overwhelmed and uncertain about my new high school identity, and Living Like a Jule took all of that fear away and replaced it with clarity. For the first time in my high school life, I began to feel like myself. Ambitious. Insecure. Hopeful. Honest.

Looking back on my past as a “millennial blogger” (as I liked to call myself back then…ugh) while currently in the throes of yet another transition in my life (can you tell I kind of hate transitions?), I am struck by how similar my experience with Her Campus has been to my work on Living Like a Jule. Both platforms came into my life at a time that I desperately needed them; Living Like a Jule when I felt like I was failing in every aspect of my new high school life and Her Campus when I was sure I wasn’t ever going to feel at home at Notre Dame. I no longer love writing for writing’s sake (my perfectionism has made sure of that—I could spend hours agonizing over a single sentence if you let me), but I do love writing for other people, as my experience at Her Campus has taught me. That’s why I’ve decided to leave my English major behind—after a particularly grueling Literary Studies class last semester, I grew dangerously close to hating reading and writing altogether. I’ve since realized that just because I love English doesn’t mean I have to pursue the English major; actually, I’m not pursuing it because I want to keep loving it (confusing, I know). I want to love my major and I want to love English, but I know now that those two things can’t exist together for me. So I guess this is goodbye, English. At least for now. Thanks for everything.