confusion

Ever since I was old enough to understand what I really wanted to become in life, I remember having wanted to be a psychologist. Contrary to the "I want to be a doctor/teacher when I grow up" dreams, I knew that talking to people, helping people was what I wanted. I was in the eighth standard, with no knowledge whatsoever about psychology, its status in India, etc, etc. I got into Speech and Hearing Therapy thinking that I would make do with even a smattering of psychology. But, for a gamut of reasons, that didn’t work out, and I got the biggest opportunity to pursue my dream. This time, I wasn’t going to screw up. After dragging Amma through all the possible colleges (or rather Amma dragging me), I got into JaiHind College, one of the reputed South Mumbai colleges.

Come the final exams of my second year at college and Annu passed away. I was jerked out of my complacency overnight and thrown into the real world; I became responsible; no more could I have fun and not give a damn about anything even fairly important. Amma and I stayed together and I was in the Third year—juggling cooking, studying, taking tuitions. In the summer, I got the opportunity to work at an esteemed psychiatric clinic, and one of the clinical psychologists there became my role model. Soon, I knew that this was what I wanted to do—clinical psychology. I put in all my efforts into studying for my finals, while battling with typhoid and chicken pox, and I survived. The next step was to get into university and Mumbai University was my goal, but I had no guarantee of getting into Clinical and opted for SNDT University in the bargain.

To support myself, I started working part-time as a copyeditor at a company and attended college, took tuitions and went nuts, in every sense. Anyway, my MA has been more of a joke than a Master’s degree, and I’m now so disillusioned with the field that I cannot consider working here. With half-baked knowledge, not an ounce of skill, I’m expected to go out into that world and influence the life of another individual. I had built a rosy picture of the psychiatric world on the basis of my internship placement, and boy, am I glad that I got to see the real world.

So, now it’s a tug of war between psychology and editing—a field in which I have found that I have a fair amount of talent—where I’m getting the opportunity to establish myself into the editing world. I’m on either side of the rope, or maybe, I am the rope that’s being tugged…

I’m lost, I don’t know whether I should be something within the field I chose and which is my passion—oh, yes! I still love psychology but something for the subject has died ever since I’ve seen its status in India and how backward and unethical we are—or to get into the publishing world and if all goes well, make a name for myself and a different career.