23 April 2015 "Dream Job"

            Throughout my life, I have been torn between two potential careers. Though the two career ideas didn’t originate at the same time and though they stem from different parts of my life, I have always felt that each one represents a unique part of me.

When I was growing up I loved animals. I got my first dog, Cinnamon, for my fourth birthday, and was hooked. Cinnamon and I were best friends, and after a day of playing outside together, when my mom would call us inside for dinner, it was Cinnamon who would tug me back to the house by the back of my shirt. However, though Cinnamon was like the sibling I never had, he wasn’t enough to satisfy my animal fascination. I had several hamsters, a lot of fish, and eventually got my other dog, Bob, and my two cats Cosmo and Grace. I loved all the pets of my relatives, and even started taking horseback riding lessons (I more enjoyed petting and brushing the horses than riding them.) Since I was an only child, I played dress-up with my dogs and pushed my cats around in baby strollers. Somehow they all still tolerated me.

            Naturally as a child in love with animals, I had aspirations to become a veterinarian. I never wanted to be a princess, I wanted to be a vet. When I was turning three I had a 101 Dalmatians party; when I was turning five or six I had my birthday party at the zoo. The zoo party remains one of the best birthdays I have ever had; not only did we get to go all around the zoo, my friends and I got to work in a realistic little station as zookeepers, animal feeders, and vets. My mom still has a picture of me holding a stethoscope to a stuffed lion framed and on the dresser in her room.

            When I was in Kindergarten, my teacher had a specific time in class every day when she encouraged us to write. We were allowed to either practice our letters, or even just write squiggles on the paper as if we were writing; but we had to use a pencil and paper and nothing else. Looking back on it, I don’t know if we actually were allowed to just write squiggles all over a piece of paper or if we were supposed to be practicing our letters and I made up the squiggles concept. Regardless, I loved writing squiggles in neat lines all over a piece of paper as if I were putting together my first novel.

            As I became more comfortable writing in more than squiggles, I began putting stories together in notebooks. I still have a pink Barbie notebook in my room somewhere with one of the first stories I can remember writing. It’s heavily based on my family; actually it’s pretty much just turning the birth of my then youngest cousin Annabel into the story of the birth of a princess. It’s eerily similar to Sleeping Beauty’s story, and my only boy cousin at the time Gabriel is depicted humorously as one of the three fairies.

When I was about seven years old, my mom, her friend, and I went on a cross-country road trip. Since my cousins lived in San Francisco at the time, my mom and I flew out to visit them, driving from their house back to ours in Maryland in an RV we rented. The trip lasted about a month, and we saw almost all the nation’s important landmarks. However, one of my most vivid memories from the trip was on my mom’s cousin’s ranch in New Mexico. Both my mom’s cousin and her husband were veterinarians; they had their own practice and were the most renowned in the area.

            In New Mexico I remember two things specifically. First, my mom’s cousin’s husband Cody attempting to teach me how to lasso—he was a native of New Mexico and what I considered to be the first real cowboy I had ever met—and when Jessica, my mom’s cousin, showed us around her office. During the tour, Jessica had to check in on the tiniest kitten I had ever seen; if I remember correctly it was wrapped in a washcloth that served as a blanket. The kitten was tiny and adorable, but also visibly sick and weak. I can’t remember what Jessica said happened to it, if she ever did, but I remember feeling so nervous and sad. I wasn’t used to animals that were sick, the animals I was familiar with pretty much never were. I shook it off for the rest of the trip, but have forever internalized the memory.

            It was the first time I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a vet anymore. As time went on my love for animals didn’t wane, but I kept having doubts about becoming a vet. I wanted to play with animals all day, but I didn’t want to have to see animals in pain, and I certainly never wanted the experience of putting an animal down. I had experienced that when my mom had to put down her cat, Quee Queg, (she had had him since before I was born) and the experience of seeing my mom cry as Quee Queg passed was devastating.

            The first time I got a TV in my room was last year; my mom was always adamant about the idea that children shouldn’t have that much access and exposure to television. However, I got a computer in my room when I was about 10 or 11 years old. It was the early 2000s, and computers weren’t all that they are now. I don’t think the computer in my room even had Internet for its first few years. It was this old dinosaur Dell computer, with a keyboard the size of my laptop now, a screen monitor that went back a good foot and a half to touch the wall, and a USB port on the huge textbook sized modem down below. All I could really do with it was open Word documents and play computer games loaded on CD disks.

            But I found hours of entertainment within the simple disk drive, mouse, and keyboard. I still have one of the first stories I ever wrote on that old Dell, printed out and in the nightstand/bookshelf of my bed. It’s somewhere around 30 or 40 pages long. And it’s all very predictable; the storyline mirrors my life and the books I was reading at the time. But I remember being content sitting in my room surrounded by the warm hum of my computer for hours. I would type lives for my characters to live, giving them things I wish I had (like a kitten, a horse, and new clothes) and making them so much more mature than their ages suggested, like I believed I was. I was in middle school, and writing was such an outlet for me, my favorite way to spend my time and so much more fun than going to school and doing math homework. Writing was mine, no one told me what to write and I was free to do whatever I felt.

            During my sophomore year of high school, my writing really took off. I was beginning to separate myself from the other kids in my English class who loved reading Shakespeare, and discovering that instead of reading our assigned books, I wanted to write books that would be assigned to students in a school somewhere. I had started my first writing blog, and though I didn’t have much to put on it I was always willing to write up a new journal entry or short story. Instead of paying attention to my teachers, I would write things I expected would be published one day. My grades weren’t the best but somehow I managed never to get caught writing when I was supposed to be paying attention.

In my junior year of high school I took my first environmental science class. It was with the same teacher who had taught my mom and aunt, and I chose it because it seemed much more appealing than the idea of physics or AP chemistry. From the very first day of class, I truly felt that I could be an environmental scientist for the rest of my life. Writing was suddenly put on hold while I complained about industrial farming and climate change to my mom, who listened patiently. I kept the blog, of course, but I didn’t publish as many journal entries and short stories. Instead I was entranced once again by the idea of animals and the earth and the way it seemed everything was suffering from the impact of humanity.  

I took my first creative writing class during my senior year of high school, and it was like an entirely new world had been opened up for me. The idea that an entire class could be devoted to writing stories and poems seemed almost too good to be true. Once again, writing overtook me and I imagined myself as a published author, going to book signings and presenting my writings to the world.

Throughout my life I have been shuffling back and forth between a tangible career and a conceptual one. It only occurred to me recently that I could combine the two; that writing can stand alone but doesn’t have to. I no longer want to be a vet but I am also no longer satisfied by the idea that I could be just an author of poetry or fiction. The biggest personal discovery I have made in my life is that I can learn about and practice multiple skills like writing and helping animals and the environment at the same time. I realized that my dreams as a child don’t need to be scaled down; they just weren’t big enough.