I grew up the daughter of an English teacher. I knew I wanted to study literature when I was about 10 years old, listening to my mom complain that her freshman Honors students weren’t understanding the climactic tree scene of A Separate Peace. I was confused as to how the 14-year-old Honors English students couldn’t grasp that “jouncing” the limb meant that Gene caused Finny to fall, an insinuation of purpose that I was entranced by. I grew up reading and writing and yearning to understand literature like no other 10-year-old. By the time I got to high school and was in Honors English myself, finally reading A Separate Peace, I was making my own judgments about characters, writing in my reading journal that Gene not only caused Finny’s fall but was deeply in love with him. I was fascinated by the tension between them, by the jouncing of the limb and its later tragic consequences. I wasn’t just reading, I was thinking critically and analyzing literature. I was writing papers and feeling proud of them. I had everything that my 10-year-old self wanted.

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But knowing that I wanted to study literature and accepting that that’s what I was going to do after high school were totally different. Being an English major was just about unthinkable. It wasn’t practical. I refused to apply to any colleges as an English major. I applied undecided in the humanities to every university, some undecided in social sciences, despite not even being able to name a single social science. 

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I knew that all of my classmates enrolled in AP Language and AP Literature because they were known to be the easiest of the AP courses, and that I enrolled in them because I wanted to study literature. I knew that my senior year wouldn’t be complete without reading Pride and Prejudice and A Tale of Two Cities. I knew that I would write my college essay about the immense joy I got from building characters from scratch, building worlds from nothing. I knew that I would pursue UMass’s Creative Writing specialization. I knew that I would take Intro to Shakespeare because I’d always wanted to take a college level Shakespeare class.

 

But I also knew that I didn’t want to turn creative writing from a hobby into a career, making myself loath my only passion. I knew that I didn’t want to be a teacher. I knew that publishing was a near impossible business to break into. I knew that if I was going to college, it should be to learn concrete skills. I knew that I should use this opportunity, this privilege, of getting to go away to university to both learn something new and do something real, non-theoretical. 

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I would always have free time in the summers to read. I could write novels when I retired. I could make a life for myself doing something else, anything else. I knew that if I went to college as an English major, I would be the same person I’d always been. Nothing would change. I’d read and write and love it, but everything would be the same as it was in high school, middle school, elementary school. And college was for new beginnings.

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So I became a Psychology major, which was incredibly stupid since you need a Masters to do anything with a Psychology degree anyway. But in my head, that was a new skill. I had taken Psychology in high school and enjoyed it. At least, the half of it I completed before school was shut down for Covid and our teacher practically fell off the face of the Earth. 

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Being a Psych major was fine. But I dreaded watching my Psych lectures. And I looked forward to my creative writing class, even looked forward to the workshops where my short stories would be ripped to shreds. By the time course registration for the spring opened, I was having trouble convincing myself that what I was doing made any sense. Why would I enroll in math and science classes when all I wanted to be doing was reading Dickens and Austen? Why was I adding a literature class to my schedule when I was supposed to be taking statistics? I knew what I wanted to do, so why couldn’t I just do it?

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In second grade, my favorite part of the day was when I finished my class work early and got to write my own stories. In sixth grade, getting put into advanced reading was my biggest accomplishment. In seventh grade, the poetry portfolio project was all I looked forward to all year. In eighth grade, I enrolled in my first creative writing class. We were tasked with writing a memoir that carried through the remainder of our life with what we wanted for ourselves. I wrote in my fictionalized future memoir that I was going to become a famous author one day.  

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In a moment of almost profound realization, I made an appointment to change my major, and within a week, I was enrolled in the Introduction to the English Major course and Intro to Shakespeare. A dream come true.

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I would get this feeling, a tightness in my chest when I would meet someone and they’d ask my major. I’d say English, and they’d assume I was going to become a teacher or that I would use it to go to Law School. I started to realize that all of those years of knowing what I wanted yet not doing anything about it was just shame. No matter how much I knew I wanted to study English, I couldn’t allow myself to want it. I thought that wanting it made me less-than. I thought that reading was a hobby, that I knew all I could about writing. What was there left to learn that was worth four years of out-of-state tuition? 

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Once I was in it, though, I started to understand. I took a poetry class for the first time, learning not how to write haikus and limericks like I had in seventh grade but learning how to express feeling in writing like I never had before. I took a postcolonial literature class and learned how much I hated Heart of Darkness and how much I loved talking about how much I hated it. Everything I thought I knew about Shakespeare was shattered when I read Othello and then Twelfth Night. I took a course on Victorian Children’s Literature, discovering the eloquence of Frances Hodgson Burnett. I thought old British plays were boring and then I read The Importance of Being Earnest and found myself laughing aloud at the absurdity. I connected with fellow writers and listened to lectures rather than simply getting through them. I once again wrote papers I was proud of and read poetry that I desired to commit to memory. Metaphor became second nature. 

 

My shame morphed into pride. Becoming an English major was a new beginning. I was learning new things every day. Sure, I wasn’t going to work with computers, become a doctor or a lawyer. I wasn’t going to work in politics or business. I wasn’t doing hands-on research work like my STEM-major friends, but I did learn concrete skills. I learned how to write using not a pen on paper but with my heart and soul. I learned how to dive deep into research, how to analyze texts, and how to make change with language. I learned how words could change lives, how stories could create hope, and how I could use creativity as power.