I am 18 years old and I’m crying so hard my then-boyfriend can’t understand what I’m saying.
It’s 9 p.m. on a Friday night, and I am sitting on my bed wearing comfy jeans and a sweatshirt and fuzzy socks. I am clutching a teddy bear I would never admit to anyone still sits on my bed, and around me are scattered the books and notebooks and pens that make up my school supplies for my classes at Sinclair Community College. I am 18 and while this is my second year taking college-level classes, I am only just beginning to feel like college is really happening to me. I am sitting on the bed, with my phone cradled to my ear and my knees pulled up to my chest, looking, I am sure, very young and scared. I am a Communications major. Up until a few months ago I was sure I wanted to transfer into a university and ultimately become a public relations specialist. I am dating the only liberal boy I know who, like me, grew up in a sheltered, strongly conservative, homeschooling world, and because this is a world I am still very much affiliated with at this point, this is still something I feel I have to justify every time someone brings it up. I am very unsure about who I am and where I am going. I am very afraid that I will never figure out where or who I want to be.
Oh, and as I mentioned, I’m sobbing. Big, hiccupping, full-body sobs that I am sure were the opposite of fun to listen to on the other end of that line.
He can’t understand me. “Can you say that again?”
“I-I don’t know what I want to do with my life!” I shuddered, trying to get my breath back while simultaneously still giving myself fully over to the utter sadness and uncertainty I feel. I am very dramatic, but my drama is based in true, deep-set anxiety and a bone-chilling feeling that I am already ruining my whole life somehow. “I have to d-decide where I want to go to school and w-what I want to do and…and…I don’t know.” Before he can respond, I rush on, panic lending an edge to my voice that (thankfully) cuts through the tears a little and allows me to be at least semi-understood. “I just don’t know. Maybe I should just take the plunge and switch my major to English. But maybe that’s totally wrong for me. I mean who decides to be a writer, like for a job? I don’t even know what I want anymore.”
He pauses briefly. “Well, what do you want to do?”
Although I didn’t have a good answer for him at the time, I eventually, as I think most people do, figured it out, at least in the short term. I did end up changing my major, and taking a chance on the things I had loved to do for as long as I could remember: writing, reading and sharing my love of books and stories with others in any way I could. I did end up going to Wright State. That boyfriend and I broke up a few months after that conversation took place (possibly because he was tired of all my sobbing), I said goodbye to a few old friends and made a few new ones, I left what had been my first and only job up to that point and moved on to my second and then my third and, all in all, my life shifted into an almost entirely new phase. All of that change was at times scary and at other times invigorating, but one thing that always felt absolutely right was my choice to change my major. Once I did it, I never looked back. We English majors can catch a lot of flack for the supposed impracticality of our majors. I can’t count the number of times someone has asked me what I’m actually going to do with my degree or joked about my spending all that money on an education that isn’t teaching me anything that’s applicable to the real world.
I would just like to go on record and say that that is total nonsense.
Being an English major has taught me so many important life lessons that are hugely important and applicable to my everyday life. Here are five of my favorites.
Different viewpoints will help you recognize perspectives and insights you never would have seen otherwise.
When I’m analyzing a piece of literature, I can reach a point where I swear I’ve explored it from every possible angle, examined every character to the fullest extent and studied every instance of metaphor and verbal irony into near non-existence. And yet, when I bring my work to others and hear their interpretations of what they’ve read, it becomes clear there is still so much to be brought forward in this piece. Studying a piece with an expert, pulling it apart and reassembling it, discussing form and function and what this wonderful working miracle of literary mastery can do for us as students and humans and explorers of this earth is one of my favorite parts of being an English major, and those unique perspectives remind me, everyone adds something to my worldview, and expands it to make it more comprehensive and full.
Discipline is an art form.
Having a structured writing time and regimen is incredibly difficult. Coaching yourself into writing a disciplined, well-structured piece of writing that is also creative, innovative, and fresh is incredibly difficult and incredibly well-worth learning. Discipline in writing will teach you how to be disciplined in life, and that alone will help you accomplish your goals with an ease you formerly wouldn’t have dreamed possible.
When in doubt, use the magic of words.
This is a fancy way of saying, if you don’t know what you’re talking about or you’re unsure how to proceed, communicate well and make it up as you go. Life does not come with instructions. The unpredictably of writing and discussion of a piece of literature mimic this without fail. It helps keep you alert and adaptable to changing situations and environments.
Doing something for its own sake is its own reward.
Despite popular conceptions, there are plenty of jobs available for English majors after college. However, it is true that job security is not always something some English majors can boast. But that’s what makes getting a degree in English such a wonderful idea in a way. Not only does it make you work harder, seize every opportunity, and appreciate more and more the ones that do come your way, it also encourages you to recognize that sometimes, doing what you really love is enough reward in itself. It helps you find gratitude, simplicity and wonder in the glories of the everyday, in the discipline of putting your hands to the keyboard, of flipping through a new story, of getting lost in a poem. It helps you find yourself in the quiet as you struggle to put words on a page. It helps you recognize the tiny details of life that you so often look over when you aren’t capturing them for the page.
It helps you live, fully and completely, and that, beyond any other reason is why being an English major is more than worth it.
