To be completely honest, I have no idea what to do. I suppose my helplessness is why I want to be a therapist. Helping people who struggle with similar things might help me, it sounds selfish, I know. It would be worse to not help others knowing I have the power to. I don’t have a teary-eyed experience to explain why I feel guilty for not helping people, I just want to be useful. Going to college to understand why and how someone feels a certain way and applying it to fix the problem catches my interest.

Ah yes, the beautiful field of psychology, a tough one too. From sad sobs to literal nightmare horror stories I have heard from therapists. The uncertainty of the job is intriguing, like a mysterious man from one of those cliché romance movies. For example: some people go to therapy just to talk about day-to-day life, unfortunately, other people would go because of trauma. You could go to therapy for a number of reasons, but you go to improve.

Seeing improvement in others inspires me to do the same, for the best at least. Simple things like eating a healthier meal because I found a video while scrolling on my phone. I don’t believe people can change, I believe that people can improve. From the example before, I’m not changing my diet from one video but I improved my meal for the day. 

The elephant just knocked on the door, I’ll let him in. The elephant in the room that I want to cover is the income. The average annual salary is $48,100, so, starting out, I will sadly not be driving in a limo, wearing my fur coat and expensive shoes. I will most likely be in debt. I’m not in it for the money, obviously, I’m in it to help. I also need to be aware that the ‘goodness of your heart’ mentality is just another way to burnout.

On another note, let's talk about the present. I’m in highschool, currently I’m taking a sociology class and next semester psychology. I knew I wanted to be a therapist when I was talking to a case manager at the end of sophomore year. One reason, I was seeing a therapist at the time and really enjoyed it. The second reason was helping people. Lastly, I only said therapist because it was the first thing that came to mind. This case manager then said that the psychology classes were hard and asked if I really wanted to do it. Me, being petty, said of course I want to do it. At the time I basically wanted to be a therapist out of spite. Then I thought about it and talked to my actual therapist. I decided that, yes, I do want to go into the field of psychology, not just out of spite, but also pure interest.

My rambles of my dream career are coming to a close. I know this will be challenging for me and I know I will complain, but I will be a therapist. Selfish or not, I want to help people to help myself.