CONFIDENCE TAKEN CONFIDENCE BUILT
After I bomded a sociology exam my freshman winter, I visited my professor. I expected a lecture on why my gut feelifigs were irrelevant (even in a course called "Marriage and the Family"), but instead got a sermon on why English was a senseless major. I would never find a job, he said. I needed something to distinguish me.
His advice came at a bad time. I had just noticed that everyone I knew had a "thing," an offbeat interest. My best friend, a trivia buff, auditioned for College Jeopardy freshman fall. Another friend was a Baroque aficionado. One was already planning to spend her summer researching her great-great-graxidfather's Civil War regiment.
I spent much of the next year pondering my lack of a special academicinterest. Then,sophomore spring, I landed in a course called "Women in Medieval Literature." The literature, though scarce, introduced us to matriarchs, martyrs, and religious figures, all of whom were virtually absent from the popular writings of the period. That class sparked something in me. I traveled to England my junior fall and wrote about how female characters talk about rape, in veiled terms, in Restoration dramas. I began to reinterpret the importance of fictional women and to find meaning in words and gestures that to others may have seemed trite or ordinary. The common became intriguing.
I wrote my senior thesis on clutter in Anne Tyler's fiction. Her characters generally considered eccentrics rather than great literary figures yearn for a simpler, cleaner, and less inhibited existence. For them, the removal of clutter represents a catharsis. Throughout the year, as I worked on my thesis, the clutter of self-doubts that had haunted me since freshman year cleared away.
After the thesis was done and graduation over, I realized that the advice I'd been given on that long-ago day was so wrong that it just might have been right. In making me doubt the field I'd chosen, I was forced to rediscover it. I had actually belonged right where I started. The difference was that now I knew why.
SUZanne Leonard is an editorial assistant at Fitness magazine.
