"Know thyself." Pretty simple concept right? I always thought it was. I mean, how could you possibly not know what's going on in your own head, not know who you are or what you want? Personally, I never understood how people could sometimes be so oblivious to themselves, how they could say one thing and do something else and not recognize the hypocrisy in their actions. I never wanted to be like that. I've always needed to be in control, be self aware, and make the right adjustments in my life or in my thinking to try and be the person that I believe I want to be. In that pursuit I feel I'm ahead of the curve. At this exact moment, at the exact second you read this, I still feel that I have a deep understanding of my morals, my convictions, my strengths and my flaws. Looking back, the changes I've made to myself since the days of high school are few and refining in nature.I mention all this because it frustrates me that I've ignored a very obvious and very real problem in my life for the last few years. . .
"Oh my God, is Tegan coming out?!?"
No, and fuck you, that's not what I'm getting at. About five years ago, me and every other junior in the country had to decide what they wanted to do with their lives. Being at the top of my class, I felt like there was an obligation to join a profession of higher status, and since math and science were always my strong suits, I decided that chemical engineering, with its prestige and lofty starting salary, was the right choice. I say "obligation" with regret now; when classmates said "Tegan is gonna be a millionaire genius and Flacco is gonna be in the NFL" and I'd scoff because I knew that big fish in a little pond often aren't the biggest in the ocean, it seems that I subconscienciously bought into that way of thinking.
The truth of the matter is that I never really got into it. I've been doing the chemical engineering thing for about four years now, completing three different co-ops along the way, and nothing has ever grabbed my attention. Not once did I ever find anything that made me say "wow, this is pretty cool, this is definitely what I want to do when I graduate." When people asked me how I liked working, I'd always say that I enjoyed being employed and earning a paycheck and the social interaction, but that the work itself was never that great. And when people asked me how classes were, I'd shrug my shoulders. I kept making excuses for myself, saying that getting my degree was just a stepping stone for real life; that if I could just get through it and find a half-decent job that paid pretty well I'd be able to create a life outside of work that I'd be happy with.
I know differently now. What I know now that I didn't want to know before is that being happy with what I do is more important to me than the dollar amount on the paycheck I earn. Fact is, in the four years I've been taking classes and working jobs, the thing I've always looked forward to is coaching, and it's not because my brothers are on the team, and it's not because I get to be involved with a sport I used to play. It's because I feel like I'm making a difference, that maybe I'm actually making those kids better players, and maybe even better people.
What I want to do is teach.
Teaching has always been an option for me, something I've discussed with friends in the past. Foolishly, I've always created reasons not to because I thought that the money and bullshit "obligation" to my high school status lay elsewhere. In the four years I've been here at school, I've never been able to actually picture myself as an engineer, but I can quite easily see teaching as something I'd be able to get up every day for. Two years ago, when my sister decided she wanted to be a high school history teacher, I was genuinely jealous. Now I'm finally reading the writing that's been on the walls.
The road to being me hasn't had all that many short-cuts, and certain choices I've made have sometimes made the trip harder. I've been honest with people to a fault, maintained sobriety to the detriment of an easy social life, and adhered to a personal code of conduct that has seen me smacking my forehead after turning down girls of the not-so-sober status. Is choosing a new career going to make the path any easier? Hell no. Doing what I plan on doing is going to change a lot of things, but I do so knowing that change as a 22 year old college student is much easier to handle than change at 32.
But it's the right choice for me to make, and it's something I know I want to do.
