Friday, July 16, 2010

Quarter Life Crisis?

I'll tell you what's scary, and that's not knowing what you want to do with your life.

Especially when you thought you know and never thought you would give it a second thought.

So now I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do next year:
Finish my theater degree at TU?
Change majors but stay at TU?
Change majors and transfer?
Go to culinary school?
Take a semester off to figure it out?

And then after that, I have to figure out what I'm going to do with my life:
Theater?
Psychology?
English?
Cooking?
Law?

On one hand, it's great to have so many choices. It's great that I'm not trapped doing something I hate with no way out. But on the other hand, it makes it that much harder to choose.

And it's scary when you realize, WHOA. I'm an adult. My parents can't make my choices for me anymore. What. Am. I. Going. To. Do.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Doubt

Since I was ten, I have never doubted what I wanted to do with my life. I want to do theater. I want to perform on the stage. I want to move to New York and be on Broadway.

But for the first time in ten years, I'm having doubts. I once read a quote by Michael Shurtleff that said something along the lines of, theater is only for the certifiably insane. If you can be happy doing something else, by all means, do it, because it's a hard life. I've known that. I've accepted it. I've always said that I would be miserable unless I did theater.

But after the hardest school year of my life, I got really burned out on theater. I can't listen to any showtunes without getting irritated. I have very little drive to do any theater. I've spent a lot of the summer volunteering at a hospital in town and I've been very happy doing it. I know I couldn't be in the medical field like both of my parents are because I'm not a science person. I would be miserable in those classes. But the work I'm doing is more of paperwork and dealing with people. I feel like I'm helping people, and that makes me really happy. I feel like I'm doing something for someone else, which is a feeling I don't always get from performing.

It makes me wonder. There probably ARE a lot of things I could be happy doing. I love studying psychology. I love reading and enjoy writing. I love helping people. I love cooking. But I have a full scholarship for four years. I'm almost done with classes for my theater degree. If I changed my major now, there is no way I could finish in two more years. And I can't afford to stay longer.

So I can only satisfy myself now by being relieved that I chose a BA degree instead of a conservatory program and hope that the theater program I start on Sunday reminds me why I used to love theater so much.

Here's hoping.