This I No Longer Believe

Seeing the Loser in the Job You Put on a Pedestal

When I was young, my mother often worked late. After long school days and during the summer, I would have a sitter watching me. This system she made was running smoothly until one fateful summer when my sitter was suddenly unavailable. My mom had already signed up to work summer school, and with the 3-day notice she was given, she just decided to take me with her. I, a third grader, went to summer school for high schoolers. 

As a youngling, teachers were kind of a big deal. A lot of the time I saw my teachers more than I saw my parents. Having that authority over me and my class for such a long time meant that there was an image being made since kindergarten. When they clapped, we clapped back. When they spoke, we listened. When they chose me as the line leader, I felt important.

Being my mom’s little tail for that week meant that I was no longer in school as a student but rather as an observer. I watched how they acted. How they would open another tab and play games instead of paying attention and doing their work. How they would keep their phone under the desk while very obviously staring at it, even when the lights were dim and their screens were bright they still acted as if they were tricking the teacher since they weren’t called out. My mom’s high school was big, much bigger than my elementary school but the class was luckily just around the corner from the bathroom. Something I didn’t get at the time was that students would use the bathroom for ten, or twenty minutes until my mom had to report a kid for skipping. They found him using the security cameras and that was the final straw.

In kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade, I just knew I was going to be a teacher. It was only natural for me. Then bam. All of that muck just completely killed the vibe. This was my “You can’t fly jets if you’re colorblind” moment. I expected dry sponges sitting at the edge of their seats ready to absorb information and I was instead met with people who skipped school, got sent to summer school, and decided to skip that too. I considered my future plans to be a very solid part of me and now that piece of me shriveled up and died. I desperately needed something to check that box and it didn’t get checked for a while.

The answer to the question “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” is a lot more important than a lot of people think. It’s not just some icebreakers annoying teachers throw out on the first day of school so people can socialize. It is a chance to look into yourself, rip that third eye open, and see. Are you really on track to be your best self? Is the road that is your life going somewhere you actually want to be? Are you using the cards you were dealt with efficiently so you can retire and live frugally or are you just here because high school is legally required until you’re 16 and once you’re 16 you might as well finish it?

My smiling teeth are so perfect, straight, and beautiful because I had braces. For a while, I would say “I want to be a dentist,” because I love my dentist, they are perfect. Everything they do is with purpose, every move is so calculated and they have never fudged up. But I didn’t really believe myself, I said I wanted to be a dentist but I knew damn well I wasn’t going to be in college for twelve years to work on people’s smelly, gummy, bloody mouths. Dentistry is a well-respected job for a reason, I mean dental health is super important, but I never once actually considered it an option for me.

It’s not like I was going the whole 9 yards looking for the perfect answer to put into my perfect plan for who I was going to be. Life went on. I ran through elementary school and skipped through most of the middle school, where we had lockers. Our lockers were weird, to make the space used much more efficiently the rows were placed parallel with each other kind of like the walls of books in a library. Our guidance counselor would coordinate the lines of middle schoolers getting their things so that no row was ever too crowded. I thought about him a lot. When I would misbehave I was sent to his office and we chatted, he had a really nice office. He had this huge fish tank and all of these decorations, his own printer, and such a big comfy chair. He coordinated the school events for the most part but I never really saw him working. Like sitting down and actually working. Not like you need to break your back to actually “work” but it should be something that at least makes you tired at the end of the day. After all, my mom always said that if you like what you do you aren’t really working. The only time I saw him do actually work, I mean work where he is truly fulfilling his googlable job description, is when I got sent to his office and we just talked about high schools. I mean I guess he also spoke with people about their feelings if they were going through something. I can so do your job is what rang through my head for the next few years. Each time it rang it was louder and louder until I started saying it out loud. 

Then I started looking up their duties, salary, and the steps it takes to become a Guidance Counselor. Did you guys know that Guidance Counselors get paid more than teachers do? Crazy considering they do less “work” than teachers do. They get the same benefits, and higher pay, and are still in school so it’s not too different. Choosing to be a Guidance Counselor instead of a teacher means I am now on a fixed path again, this one being much more solid than the previous one obviously. This also means that I’ll be living that good American Dream type of life that I always wanted. Everything will be mine. But this was all in my head, let’s go back to what I was actually doing. 

Afterward, I applied to schools and checked off “psychology” whenever they asked for my intended major. Last fall I took Bob Melaras’ Psychology In The Modern World and boy, was it affirming. We learned a little about the brain and what drugs do to it, parenting styles, and like all these old theorists that made up crazy stuff and called it science. When I learned about parenting styles I started analyzing my own parents, when I learned about the effects of drugs like marijuana and nicotine I started noticing people’s behaviors and just thought “damn”. I swear that one class totally opened my third eye, maybe even my fourth too. Psychology isn’t like math where you have to plug in all these numbers or English where you have to write pages and pages of something. Mind you this was an intro class, literally PSY 102, but it was just learning terms for the most part. You could say that’s what every class is but if you did you just wouldn’t be getting it. I never considered myself to be a passionate person when it comes to my career after that one summer but I felt a little something during that class. I knew I could be in this field for 30-40 years.