Putting my major together has been like reconstructing Frankenstein’s monster. Crudely fused together with classes from five separate schools, dozens of credits have been left behind like body parts on the cutting room floor. Bloody stumps on rotted appendages, coagulating, scarring in the form of college loans. Perhaps, we could file my lost credits as ‘part of the journey’ toward my major, but the complicated path to what seems a straightforward end has been difficult to make sense of, much less integrate.
The origins of majoring in English started in the summer of 2006. After failing twice to make life work in New York City post-high school, I got a job at a liquor store in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston. The seven months of seven bucks an hour, living in my dad’s house, and generally being a drunken fuckup, had left me depressed, restless. Considering I spent the bulk of high school, ADD riddled, and thinking about anything other than school, my substandard transcript left little options for college. As a local, I thought UMASS-Boston might offer an easy bar for entry, and after a few semesters of good grades, a recent college transcript may help leverage a way to travel outside of the Greater Boston area to finish out my degree. I’d been obsessed with the idea of seeing America at the time, all of it, even Nebraska. Surrounded by trophies and pictures paying homage to past glories, and dead broke, I read through a hard copy of Lonely Planet’s cross-country road trip guide three times whilst milling in my dusty, childhood room. My friends had found employment out of the gate with their newfound college degrees. And there I was, without enough cash for a couple slices from the pizza shop down the street. How could I get to places like Las Vegas and San Francisco on this flat-lining trajectory? I figured school was a tangible way to do that. If I couldn’t transfer to another school in a different city besides the well worn, confusing streets of Boston, perhaps school would help open up jobs and earning potential on a bigger scale.
I was accepted (thank god) to UMASS Boston and started summer intensive courses in 2006. Long before I realized how much I actually disliked the process, I wanted to be a writer. Without fully realizing the jaded pain of voluntarily sitting and poring over a blank screen yet, I started slowly with two writing intensive English classes. As with most of the pivotal decisions involved with my major, it was made with simple logic: I figured English was the most approachable way to experience college courses. I knew the language, I knew how to write with relative clarity, and English didn’t offer equations, variables, periodic tables, laboratories, or anything else that would truly cause my head to pretzel with thought migraines.
I stayed up until the AM the night before every paper, buzzed, stoned, irascible, furiously sputtering out words. I remember being quite proud of a paper I wrote about how violence in the media correlated with violence on the streets. In hindsight, the paper was trash (broad statements, little objective proof, filled with white ignorance, etc.), but I did well in the English classes, so I started to trust the process, as unhealthy as it was at the time.
I applied to the New School University for the spring of 2007. I was rejected. I was devastated. I had worked so hard on the two essays for the application, and it all felt embarrassing at 22 years old, well past the phase my peers had gone through this process. But I was determined to leave Boston, and make New York work after my two failed attempts. So I applied for a loan and paid The New School to attend without formal acceptance. There, I took two night courses, “Writing from Personal Experience” and “Classic British Literature”, while working at a Wine Store fulltime in the Flatiron district. It all became too much for me. And while I aced “Writing from Personal Experience”, I was lagging in British Literature, where every book was Jane Eyre or David Coppefield, and five million pages. I burnt out after the semester, and decided to stick with full time work.
From there, it was an educational slumber between the years of 2007 – 2012 as I bummed around the wine sales floors and stock rooms of Manhattan for pittances. It was spring of 2012 when the defibrillator was applied to my college career. Like a magnet burrowed inside me, I was again drawn to creative writing. I figured English was a broader way to pursue writing, and no one actually needs a degree to write, but instead, to get them in the door of most companies that paid a decent wage. I applied and attended Hunter College, determined to finish my degree. With a focus on literature and creative writing with a gen-ed course sprinkled in here and there, I took part time classes in Hunter, until the Spring of 2015. Despite being a little over a year away from graduation, the lure of the degree had faded into the rearview, and the lure of a ‘career’ had materialized. While attending night classes, my day had been swallowed up by my job after my promotion to cellar manager. After one semester of trying to balance the duties associated with middle management and classes, I realized instead of excelling at anything, I was rendered mediocre at two pursuits. I decided to take a semester off to try to get my mind right, but it took much longer than a few months, several years actually. My job was taken over by the owner’s hands-on, Trump-idolizing insurance salesman douchebag son-in-law. (And then the country was taken over by Trump himself.) I lost my job, hit the bottle hard, got a different job in the same field, but had to travel to New Jersey monday through friday, so I hit the bottle harder, then went through a downfall which took me took dark places, and ended with me quitting drinking and by association, quitting a 13 year career in Wine and Spirits. As the fog settled over my mind, covid exacerbated the fog, and cost me a job I had at the time working in middle management in Massachusetts corporate cannabis. It was a merciful layoff, and during the cold winter of Covid, my college career was resurrected for the last time.
My odyssey to this “final” semester (I’ll believe it’s over when it’s over) has been the most erratic, slipshod, start/stop experience of my life. The irony of trying to frame my major within the concept of integration isn’t lost on me. When all of it boils down to a simple decision made a year ago. After an audit of classes, and working with the English adviser, it became clear English with a focus on creative writing would present the least amount of remaining classes, and the quickest way to earn a degree, so we moved forward with that.
In many ways, I never chose a major, my major chose me. I had always wanted to study the basics of English I didn’t appreciate in high school. I wanted to read more, fill my bookshelves to the ceiling with books. And most of all, I wanted to write. I wanted someone to force me. Not only to write for myself, but to write for others. So I chose English as a major. With hindsight, what I didn’t realize was that the greatest thing English offered me was the ability to understand. It helped me understand how language can be used to help others, to offer support without misunderstandings, and to offer love when physical boundaries are more fortified than ever. In contrast, more than ever now in 2022, I’ve also learned how it’s used to hurt others, to degrade and dismiss. It helps me understand the pressured moments in which words break down and (d)evolve into actions. There is no greater accolade, no plaudit of greater significance in my life than someone or something that offers me a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.