There’s a new trend, it seems, amongst college peers called major shaming. “Oh he’s just an art history major,” or “she’s just a journalism major,” making people feel as though their choice of major and aspirations aren’t as valid as the dual bio-chem major. Hats off to those people, by the way, because I’m not trying to denounce the importance and difficulty in those fields.
Every major has its difficulty. I’m not saying that psychology is the hardest field out there because then I’d be lying. It’s not as difficult to study seeing as we don’t have to memorize every bone or muscle in the human body, but that doesn’t make it a piece of cake, either. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked what my major was and I received a half-ass “ahhh…” as they awkwardly looked to pick up on a new subject, it would pay off my student loans. Yes, student loans! Can you believe it?! We have them, too, and they suck!
Everyone thinks their major is awesome, and that’s important. You should be excited about what you’re doing and what you’ll achieve along the way. Every route you’re able to take in college will bring you to something magnificent at the end if it’s what you truly enjoy. So who cares if it’s not a money-making industry? If I’m able to live comfortably doing something I love, what else matters? What’s the point in shaming people for not going after the most prestigious job fields that the world offers?
Everyone is so quick to jump to conclusions like, “well, they took the X route so they must not be smart enough to have gone the Y route.” No! What you enjoy and what you’re capable of doing are two different things sometimes. I could have been a doctor if that’s what I wanted to be, but I didn’t. I wanted to heal people but not in the traditional way. Psych majors care about the mind, how people think, why people do the things that they do, and how to help those who are stuck inside of their heads as they try to escape the harsh reality of mental illness. There’s medicine to heal the pain of a leg injury, but sometimes it takes more than popping a Xanax to ease the pain of someone suffering from severe anxiety. Sometimes it takes more than just downing a pill bottle of Prozac to make someone feel like themselves again after battling depression.
We’re not just psychology majors. We learn more in school than just Freudian theories and why babies learn to walk around 12 months old. We learn empathy and compassion. We learn how to, literally, talk someone off of a ledge and prevent suicides. We learn how to console a grieving mother through the loss of her child or a child through the loss of her parent. The theories, approaches, terms, and famous psychologists’ names are all helpful, but what really sticks with us after class is all over or our internships are through are the people, the real-live case studies, that we’ve experienced and how we have the power to help people just like them.
We aren’t just people in dress-suites sitting on plush white couches showing you inkblots to determine your cognitive abilities. We’re the arms that hold a mother after she just miscarried her third baby. We’re the voice on the other end of the phone in the middle of the night as a man contemplates ending his life right then and there. We’re the person playing checkers with your six-year-old, determining why he can’t hold his attention for more than three minutes at a time without bursting into a fit of rage.
None of this is to say that there aren’t more difficult, practical things someone could do with their time, but sometimes it isn’t about that. Sometimes it isn’t about what pays the most, what will give you the biggest name in the city, or what you can tell your relatives at Thanksgiving dinner about the latest advancement you’ve been working on. All of that is great and wonderful, but sometimes life is about making that one person smile who needs it. Psychology majors may not be changing the world and advancing in medicine, but to someone out there, we changed their world. We helped them live one more day, cope with their mental illness, or even just get out of bed that morning. To some, that’s all it takes to change their world around.
We may not be healing bodies, but we’re healing souls.
