In my first year at Stanford, I despised telling people I was an English major. Too often did people make jokes about me not being able to get a job after graduation. These were funny at first, but exhausting by the thirtieth fake laugh. I felt like handing out business cards that read: “RIBKA DESTA, LARKIN, SHE/HER, CLASS OF 2027, FUTURELY UNEMPLOYED” just to save time.

Still, I never contemplated majoring in something else. 

I knew I wanted to write since I was young. In second grade, my “Career Day” costume was an author. I showed up proud in a long brown dress and tight bun with a book in hand. In fourth grade, I wrote a “memoir” in a memo book and passed it around the classroom. I’ll never forget the pride I felt watching my classmates wait impatiently to enjoy something I created. From that point forward, I lived to entertain. 

There was nothing in my life I had ever loved more than writing and reading. Not a person, not even myself. Choosing something else was unthinkable. Writers can swirl black and white text into a million colors and images. Once you have the power to make anything with just twenty six letters, you can’t put the sword down.

I understand that most people come down to earth eventually. I understand why people shed their astronaut/rockstar/NFL dreams for stabler paths. But every day I awake at Stanford, my dream lingers. I chose Stanford for its English department, and I’ve never not been grateful for it. 

Being friends with creative writers at Stanford means hearing the most insane concoctions of the English language over brunch at Stern. It means swooning over someone’s interpretation of a work and begging them to commit their brain to science postmortem. It also means being surrounded by people who have been talented for so long they have lost their awe of their own art. These are people who put down the pencil after a few sporadic WAYS courses and never create again. I can’t fathom it. 

I think they are just as nonsensical as I am, sometimes. If you’re one in a million, why choose to be one in a hundred in an office you don’t like, living a life that’s not yours? 

At the same time, they are right to. This economy is scary, the future is far and regret is a paradox. I’ll probably wonder in ten years if I should have chosen a life that made more money, and that Ribka — the Ribka that never existed outside my parent’s red-white-and-blue aspirations, the Ribka who took the road far more traveled by — will wonder if she could have chosen to soar instead of settle.