Take That, Dad!

In Which I Bitch-Slap Expectations...

I have always been the type of person that people expected to go to graduate school.  My dad started collecting MBA brochures for me when I was in the third year of my undergraduate degree.  I even expected myself to go to graduate school.  It was like an eventuality, the accepted order of operations: high school diploma, undergraduate degree, Masters' degree.  So to say that my family and friends reacted with surprise at my decision to get a second undergrad degree would be a gross understatment.

They were shocked.  They were appalled.  But you have a Commerce degree! they all exclaimed.  That makes you employable and valuable! they protested.  Shouldn't you be going to law school? they asked.  My poor dad just shook his head and didn't say a word so deep was his disappointment and confusion.

This September, as I started my second undergrad degree (an Arts degree, no less), I was acutely aware that at least two people from my high school graduating class were starting law school, that one person I had gone to university with was starting a Masters' degree at Oxford and that another had just finished a PhD in Chemical Engineering.  Even my sister, who in spite of being brilliant is the sibling that everyone secretly worries about being able to support herself  as an artist and musician, was doing a Masters' in Architecture.  And I am starting an Arts undergrad degree.  Over the past 10 years, I have managed to seriously defy everyone's expectations and majorly underachieve in comparison.

Here's the best part - I'm totally fine with this.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I'm getting to a point where I'm totally fine with this.  I'm close.  I prefer not to think of myself as an underachiever.  I like to think of it as more of a wanderlust.  I still fully expect myself to achieve great things over the course of my lifetime but I'm going to do it on my terms and in my own time.

Unlike my first degree, I'm studying what I want to not what is expected of me.  I'm allowing myself the luxury of immersing myself in a subject that I am interested in and excited about.  I'm indulging my creative side for a change and it feels damn good.  Expectations and judgements can take a back seat for now because no one who has done anything brilliant has done it by following the rules.  Order of operations be damned, I'm an undergraduate student - again.