I am a right brainer. At least, that's what I've been told since about the second grade. While my parents and siblings leaned toward the logic and mathematical side of life, my head tended to be up in the clouds. I wrote stories, made games, and was affectionately known as "the creative one of the family."

At first it seemed like a compliment; I could create when others couldn't. I could make something out of nothing. But, as I got older, the words became sharper to me, no longer having a good connotation. "You're such a right brainer" twisted into "You realize you're not like them" in my mind. I couldn't let go of the fact that I couldn't think like them, solve problems like them or be like them.

I stopped creating stories. I couldn't do it anymore. In high school, I felt my right brainness dwindle, but my left brain didn't grow. I was too logical to be creative; everything had to be perfect, symmetrical. Everything must have its place, its purpose. But I couldn't wrap my head around numbers, and I couldn't understand even the most basic physics. I love science too, but I have to work absurdly hard to understand it, to a point where I appear stupid. My head was still too high up for information to fit together like a puzzle, but not high enough to create a new puzzle altogether.

So when I graduated from high school, I figured I'd take the route I'd always figure I'd go on; English. Everyone I knew said it was perfect for me. "I was so creative; I'd go far." "They always knew I'd end up a writer." They didn't know that I hadn't even considered writing fiction since I entered high school. The one thing I thought I was decent at was gone. I was eighteen and already washed up, only writing poems that never saw the light of day.

I couldn't shake that nagging thought, and even worse ones began to bubble up. My major felt empty; there was no passion for me when I'm creating simply for money. I didn't want my love for words to be fueled or even replaced by greed. I didn't want to come to hate something I lived for...even if I couldn't visibly live for it all the time.

I didn't want to disappoint them. They probably knew me better than I knew me, and I didn't want to appear defiant and fail. And if English was perfect for me then why should I change it? Wasn't perfection what we all strived for?

That was when I felt the movement in my assumed dormant left side. "Science." It whispered. "You know enough about English, and you could learn something that could help the world."

Keep in mind; I hate changing plans. Once I make up my mind up, I map out absolutely everything about it. Ditching entire plans left me stranded, and I hated it. But the mere idea of helping the environment, traveling to save the world that had always saved me, made me happier than I had been in the three weeks I'd been at school.

So I began my digging. Within two hours, instead of considering dropping out of school like I had been, I was planning a future centered around a major in environmental studies.

I'm terrified. I'll have to learn to work in a different way, study in a different way. I can't breeze through science the way I can through English. But I get to learn something new, exercise that part of my brain that is out of shape but still affects my life.

Maybe I'm not a right brainer. I'm not a left either. I'm some hybrid of both where logic clogs my creativity and creativity tangles up my sense of logic.

It's strangely freeing, not being held down by the label that separated me from the ones I love. And I can finally honestly say that I don't dread my future.