Lesson #16

I myself think I am Las Vegas sometimes. Not because I believe myself to be overly extravagant, but because I often feel like the “world outside.” Right now we all live in this extremely tense atmosphere that is full of people doing everything they can to stand out to colleges. I see my friends running themselves to exhaustion trying to become the most appealing to schools that are terribly hard to get into. Every single friend I have is currently trying to get into the U of M medical school, and frankly I have no such desire. Science has always been my worst subject, and I would never dream of pursuing that as a career. They all stress about their grades in ways that I can never imagine. For that, I always feel like I am doing something wrong. I wake up everyday to go to school with the future doctors of the world, and that makes it incredibly hard to feel like I belong.

All of my life I have been dreaming of being a lawyer, and defending people that have been wronged-- which in itself seems like an incredible career, but yet for some reason so out of the ordinary. As all of my friends have complex conversations regarding DNA, I cannot even begin to grasp these concepts. Yet if you put me behind a podium with something to argue about, I could have the time of my life.

I was helping a friend write a debate the other day, and it finally occurred to me how different my brain works, compared to the brains of my friends. As she sat there trying to work out every ounce of logic, I was thinking about the million different kinds of emotional appeal. I realized that as much as I want to be someone who thinks about nothing but sensibility, I will always be the person who can convince someone's heart before I can convince their brain.

Now I feel like I know Vegas on a personal level. It can never blend in, and it cannot assimilate with the dessert around it; nor can I blend in with the science majors of this world. Vegas is always taken like a joke, the party place of the west-- but nobody understands that it is simply different from everything surrounding it. I may not stress about my grades like everyone else does, but that is because I have to be passionate about something to apply myself to it.

As much as we make fun of Vegas for being one giant party, it is also full of people who seem to be able to make a business out of anything. We underestimate their ability, just like I too underestimate my own. I am surrounded by people who have 4.0 GPAs and who will become the future geniuses of this world, but just because I aspire for something different doesn't mean that I cannot change the world one day too.

Lesson #16: A path is like a fingerprint, no two can be the same.