What are you doing?!

 

I've never really known what the end goal is. Plenty of people I know are studying for very niche degrees, which are a direct route to a particular job. Studying English Literature has to be the biggest outcry that I don't know what I'm working towards.

I know people who have known what they want to do with their lives since they were five years old and have stuck with it to this day. People who make a plan and stick with it are the type of people I admire. They seem to have it all together. I just feel like the clock is ticking down to the day where I have to make a sudden choice, and be resolved to it forever after. I am a serial worrier and doubt decisions I make about lunch, never mind massive life-changing decisions. That's why it took me a whole year of uni before I left and changed courses.

Majestic as hell

When I was four, I wanted to be a mermaid. This was a perfectly legitimate life goal at that point. I was working towards it in the form of taking swimming classes and swotting up by watching The Little Mermaid ten thousand times a week. I couldn't wait until I was older and could dye my hair the pillar box hue that seemed to naturally sprout from Ariel's head. I still love the sea.

As I grew older, I decided a "proper" profession would be to become a vet. I liked animals and science (well, I liked making jelly in primary school, which was what the science lessons basically consisted of). It was going well, I had it sorted. Then I watched some kind of animal hospital programme, where a bovine vet was called out to a medical emergency on some remote farm. Never will I get the image of this poor woman shoving her entire arm inside a cow's rear end out of my head. Thus ended that dream. Interestingly, a friend of mine is actually in the process of training to be a vet and as part of her recent work experience, she also had the pleasure of reaching into a cow's backside. So, nice save, Katherine!

I reached secondary school with no plans of looking to the future, after being let down by Disney and cow butts. I pushed through school, got decent grades and had to make the decision about what I would study at university. It was the done thing to go to university and anyone considering other options was put on a kind of watch-list by the teachers, which I suppose is good as they we making sure you didn't "throw away your education" or something. I chose psychology, I'm not sure why; it was interesting I suppose? The psychology programme at university included a module on possible career outcomes at the end of the course. None of them massively caught my imagination; not even the cat counsellor, who gave us a two hour lecture on how it was an expanding field full of adventure. She seemed unhealthily obsessed with cats.

I left that course to follow my one true calling; English Literature. I had always been a bookworm, up until I discovered the magic of YouTube and watching countless hours of meaningless videos on the internet. University is forcing me to sit down with a book every now and again, which is what I wanted to get back to anyway. At least now I am studying a subject with broad outcomes, which could springboard me into unchartered territory. 

Maybe it's a good thing that I don't know what to do with myself. There's a quote from someone, maybe one of my teachers even said it, that was something like "The most interesting 40 year olds I know, still don't know what they want to be when they grow up". I guess that makes my mum interesting, as she tells me all the time she doesn't know what she wants to do. Getting all philosophical here, maybe life isn't about aiming towards something, because when you get there, what else is there? For now, I'll just bumble my way through life, until something shiny catches my eye.