As children, we are always talking about what we are going to be when we grow up. It’s one of the first questions you’re asked when you are little and adults are starting to ask you questions about yourself. The littlest version of me wanted to be a writer. As I changed, so did my dreams.
In high school, I decided I wanted to be a pediatrician. I had all these ideas of how I would make the tender, vulnerable spaces children occupy in hospitals and doctors’ offices safe and playful. I decided it was going to be my perfect dream.
But I realized quickly that chemistry and physics were not subjects I could picture myself learning about any longer than I was required to in a high school lab. Perhaps being a pediatrician wasn’t going to be the dream that would help me thrive and grow healthily. It felt both disappointing and relieving when I realized that medical school was not something that I wanted enough. I had changed my mind.
Somehow, through a conglomeration of a million little things, I started to realize that perhaps being an educator might be a new dream worth pursuing. By surprise, I started to see that this was a seed that had been planted in me when I was still little, and this realization started to light a spark within me.
I wasn’t expecting to go to Queen’s. As I applied to universities, there ended up being programs I wasn’t expecting to get into that I did and programs I wanted to get into but didn’t. I had all these ideas of what I supposed my life would look like during my undergrad. Yet there were countless things that I had barely considered notions I had only conceived of narrowly because I was still very much figuring things out.
Once at Queen’s, I thought I might major in English and then go to Teacher’s College. As I started first year and everyone and their mother seemed to be asking the typical, “Where are you froms” and “What program are you ins,” I felt awkward saying that I wasn’t in Con-Ed, even though I still desperately wanted to be a teacher. Saying that I changed my mind about my studies, no longer on a path that I was locked into, felt complicated sometimes.
In first year, I took PSYC 100 mostly because I was trying to hack my own unofficial Con-Ed degree but ended up surprising myself by liking it. Soon, I changed my mind about English being my entire focus and decided to double-major in Psychology and English (even though I told everyone from my therapist to my parents, who are also therapists, that I would never).
Ultimately, the way my undergraduate experience has panned out hasn’t at all been the way I expected—in every way, shape, and form. The person I am today is very different from the girl who moved into those cinder-blocked dorm rooms on West Campus in first year. But I wouldn’t change any of it for the world.
My story is different from yours. Perhaps it is more dramatic or less so. Perhaps you can see yourself in my musings; perhaps you don’t. Regardless, I know you have probably changed too. You too have probably experienced that uncomfortable sinking feeling in your stomach that feels both like hope and grief, suggesting that, perhaps, you have changed your mind.
Cheers to you, who have changed your mind, who have grown in unexpected ways that have catapulted you into the blooming of your now.
“We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change. Congratulations, if you have changed.” —Mary Oliver
So congratulations. You made it here.