On being an English Major

I'm know I've mentioned before on this blog the inevitability of having one's life as an English major continually called into question.

Relatives look worried, refuse to believe that it's a thing, and continue to talk about what you'll actually do when you grow up.  Everyone, even complete strangers, immediately senses that it must never have occurred to you that majoring in English (despite the many studies demonstrating otherwise) is a poor career decision that dooms you to a lifetime of living in a garret eating porridge. It is now their right to inform you of the errors of your choice and persuade you to follow a path more conducive to the earning of wealth and privilege and a life like theirs. It's a constant sussuration of doubt that builds in steady intervals into an inner crescendo of disquiet.

I am not doubt-free. But my doubts are never doubts about being an English major in the same way that others doubt the decision to be an English major. Mostly my doubts are about not being good enough. I've written before on why it isn't the "easy" major that everyone assumes it is. If it is for you, then you're doing it wrong.
Or I'm an idiot. 
See, that's a doubt.

It's all a question of what's important. I am never going to be rich. I may never own a house, or anything more care-intensive than a garden gnome. Although, they can be surprisingly fragile.

I'm not saying you're wrong to choose not to be an English major. Part of becoming an adult is deciding what's important to you and what you are willing to sacrifice for.

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”   -- C. S. Lewis

 

This post brought to you by an article that caused me to think: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Ideal-English-Major/140553/