The holidays bring about an incessant wave of questions from relatives whom I only see once a year if I’m lucky. “Where are you going to college?” and “What do you want to do when you’re older?”, tossed around like live grenades, threatening to blow if I say something like I want to major in Art History. Maybe I will say just that one day, and stand there laughing in the crater that appears, still echoing with horrified screams. But the Christmas barrage I just endured made me wonder, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” and I gave myself the same answer I gave to my Aunt Sue: I have no freaking idea.

Fairy Princess is off the table, and has been since my tenth birthday. I run through a list of things I like to do in my head; eat, sleep, and watch Breaking Bad is what I come up with. However, I don’t think that being unemployed would be very lucrative, and I’d have to be better at chemistry for the meth thing to work out. I do my best work when I’m busy, and I enjoy a challenge. I like to learn, and be around smart people (but not too many, I want to be at least the tenth smartest in a room at all times. I need to feel good about myself somehow.) I hate kids, so anything where I have to look at snot faced germ machines is out automatically. The barrage keeps coming and I don’t have an answer yet. I do well in school, isn’t that enough for my second cousin George who’ve I’ve only seen two times in the last four years? Apparently not. Art history is starting to look better and better.

College, a word thrown about like it’s as light as a tennis ball. But for me, it’s the weight of an anvil, and it’s sitting on my shoulders. My brother barely graduated high school, but he got into every university he applied to. His crappy grades were bolstered by a kick-ass SAT score and a personal statement that was truly personal. My brother and I are a great example of two people growing up in the same circumstances, but with two very different outcomes. I was lucky enough to escape the ominous dark cloud of depression that hangs over my family, but my brother wasn’t so lucky. He struggled in high school, and his illness wasn’t aided by piles of busy-work and irksome group projects. So he chose not to complete them. And to be perfectly crass, he hit the bong where I hit the books. But still, he got into college and is doing amazingly well, so why am I so nervous? I am nervous because there are expectations trailing me like a shadow. Not my family’s, they have been nothing but supportive, and thankful that one kid turned out healthy, and that the other has finally found his stride. The expectations I have stacked on myself, one after the other, of good grades and strong test scores are sticking to me like gum on the bottom of your shoe, annoying, and really freaking hard to scrape off.

I know that by the time I’m thirty I don’t want to be dull and drab, sitting at a desk and doing a job I hate, just because it pays well. And that’s what my Aunt Sue and Uncle Tom don’t understand, money isn’t the only factor in my future. Sure I enjoy picturing myself rolling in Benjamins and throwing them from the rooftops just because I can, but I also want to find happiness. And I won’t find that in a math or business degree, it’s just not who I am. So my plan is to focus on the present and to do the best I can while I’m figuring it out, and hope that there is happiness in my future. Some Benjamins would be nice too.