Wednesday, February 4: Where She Wants to Go, What She Wants to Do, Who She Wants to Be

Lucia is selecting classes for junior year. She is supposed to start choosing classes that create kind of 'narrative' for what she wants to study. We are trying to help (not that she wants our help), but she truly has no idea what she is interested in. 

I can relate. I recently came across a bio I wrote during my summer at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, which was the summer of 1994, when I'd just finished my junior year of high school. I was seventeen. This bio was to be included in a collection of pieces written by the other students in my poetry class:

        Besides writing poetry, Margo "Violet" Orlando also enjoys writing in her journal, playing the violin,         and acting. This year, she will be a senior at Geibel High School in Connellsville, PA. Margo's future         plans are completely made--where she wants to go, what she wants to do, who she wants to be--and            she's waiting for just the right moment to reveal these plans to the world.

Upon graduation, Margo "Violet" Orlando decided she'd major in biology; then she chose exclusively literature and writing classes for her electives. Andrew graduated high school claiming he'd major in pre-med; then filled his schedule with English and Spanish. At the end of his freshman year, his advisor pointed out that perhaps he wasn't exactly on a path to pre-med after all. (Andrew also set out to work in book publishing and now works in global AI robotic-blueberry tech subscription partnerships, or something, so his path is perhaps an exemplar of the twists and turns a professional life can take.) 

Only now, pushing fifty, can I claim to have a reasonable semblance of answers to the questions I listed in that bio. But at seventeen? Absolutely no clue. So while I understand the need for a high school transcript + activities + other college application materials to show a kind of logic to these final high school years, I also feel like the entire exercise is absurd. Lucia doesn't know! And she doesn't have to know! (Of course, she told us she thinks she's interested in focusing on chemistry then showed us her first-choice classes, none of which were science and all of which were humanities. So, I mean, she kind of does know the broad outlines of her interests, even if she doesn't realize it.)

Anyway. No one knows a g-d thing at sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen--or, more accurately, no teenager knows what they already, deep down, know. The unknown known (to borrow from Dani Shapiro) needs many more years to emerge.