When I first went to college, you may be unsurprised to learn that I was kind of panicked. I didn’t know what to major in and I didn’t have any idea of how to choose. No one in my family had been to college before except for my brother and it seemed like he always knew that he wanted to study film. Should I study film I thought? What about English? I always did well in English. But I was also incredibly anxious about the climate crisis. A little obsessed even. You’re supposed to go to college to save the world right?
Insert montage of me running a Greenpeace campaign on campus, joining the Free the Planet club, and trying to study for all my science classes and instead staying up too late reading novels and writing bad poetry and short stories and blog posts that only my ex-boyfriend would read when I got distracted by my imagination or emotionally bored. Though I loved and still love to stare at rocks, I remember distinctly being more preoccupied with all the imaginative worlds and possibilities my geology TA’s face elicited in me than categorizing another stone.
My wake-up call came when something happened that I had many nightmares about for years: I slept through my alarm on the day of my final. I’d been up too late the night before finishing a novel loosely based on the life of the musician Jeff Buckley and it moved me to tears. When I ran to my geology final with just enough time to pass the exam, I knew I had to reexamine my life. I knew I wanted to read books and talk about them and write them too, even if that seemed like an impossible dream. Why was I resisting what was already coming so naturally to me? I see now that I’d been taught to believe work has to be hard and if it’s not boring and painful and full of inner resistance, then it must not be meaningful or important, right? This was and continues to be a deeply dysfunctional belief I still sometimes find myself circling back to!
Not long after this, I switched my major and spent my last two years of school double-majoring in both English and writing and took as many film classes as I could. My whole life at school became about language, history, images, imagination, and story, and I used those skills in the ways I could while still volunteering with the environmental club. When I panicked again, realizing I had no idea how I would get a job with an English degree during my junior year, it turned out that my passion for environmental activism and stories is what got me my first publishing internship with a textbook company that then led to me getting my first job out of college as, get this: an environmental science and biology textbook editor (lol I know).
What felt like a failure—my inability to focus and commit to getting an "important“ degree in environmental science—ultimately turned into an opportunity in ways I could have never foreseen or imagined. I just kept trying things. I kept going and hoping and trusting the process.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Ask a Failure to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.