I go to a Liberal Arts College.

I know, I know, you baby boomers are feeling sick to your stomachs now and your mouse is hovering over the big red X in the corner, but hear me out.

I go to a liberal arts college because I want to have a steady income in the field of my choice when I graduate. Granted, the economy sucks and we're all going to die one day, but I pay tuition so that my life isn't disastrous in four years (thus making my life worse than what it already kind of is).

Statistically speaking, I have a higher likelihood of getting and keeping a job because I plan to graduate from Converse College. Here, I will be taught the communication skills that I need to be successful in life, and I will learn to be independent and how to become the woman I want to be one day. As the motto for the school year states:

"I am determined to rise."

But, I digress (as I so often do). I am still undecided on my major, and I'm torn on what I want to do. Part of me wants to teach English to high schoolers and "make no money", but the other part of me wants to become a therapist to keep other people from killing themselves or starving themselves or listening to the voices in their heads...just to keep people from hurting themselves in general. Either way, I want to help people, and I want to save them from this overwhelmingly demanding, scary, panic-inducing world of ours. I want to change the world, one mind at a time.

But I am perpetually exhausted from answering the same stupid questions every time someone learns that I'm enduring my freshman year of college already. "What are you studying? Well...what are you going to do with that?"

Just once, I want to look them in the eye and say "Nothing. Not a damn thing. I am wasting the next four years of my life at college, spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to dig myself into a hole of debt, just so I can graduate and work in a fast food joint for the rest of my miserable, insignificant life." You know...just to see what they would say.

Okay, I get it. If I go into one field then I'll be paid next to nothing, and if I go into the other then I'll be "supplying a field where the demand has already been met and exceeded." That's my problem to deal with though, not yours.

And frankly?

I don't give a damn about your opinion or advice or what you think of my life choices. I am going to grow and learn and breathe on my own time, and your thoughts about my life aren't going to be a part of any of that. When I'm sitting somewhere in ten years, loving my life and happy, I'll remember those words you said, and grind them into the floor with the heel of my shoe. Just because you didn't make the right decisions in life and feel the need to push that misery onto other people, doesn't mean that it's going to come true.

I am determined to rise.