Bizarre Take #11 - Life After 18 Gets Real

 2. Write a personal narrative in which you describe a role that your family or friends expected of you but that you either refused to play or struggled against. Explain the origin and nature of the expectation, as well as your reasons for not wanting to fulfill it. Include a discussion of the reactions you have gotten as you challenged the role or expectation.

One role my family expected of me was to follow in their career path, which was computer science. Both my parents have pursued computer science back in India, and were able to make a living here in the United states. My mom wasn’t able to pursue it as a job, however, due to responsibilities with me and my sister. This expectation came from a family trend of being a par of engineering, and my parents wanted me to have a secure job, something they had been able to do in the US. It came from confidence knowing this job was financially supportive. This pushing onto me was done primarily for “my own good", even if I wasn’t particularly aligned with this mentality.

All throughout my childhood, my parents, especially my dad, tried to get me involved in programming and robotics to steer my interest towards Engineering. Words like RAM, coding and robotics flew around me, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it simply was not my passion. Instead, I choose to pursue medicine, a long-time passion of mine. I was very interested in biology, so I told my parents this despite their expectations for me. I know this wasn’t what they expected, but I knew I had the motivation and passion to make it happen. It was a risk worth taking, and I knew once I was able to pursue it, it would be very financially stable. My parents, once I told them, were disappointed at first. They weren’t sure if I had the academic ability to handle the workload, and were worried about my career. At first, I was shocked! How are you going to tell me what I want to do? You want me to be happy, yet you choose what I do with my career? How ironic is that? Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of pursuing your passion if it is just about the money? These questions swarmed my head, filling me with worry and confusion. Was I even sure if this was the right choice for me?

This wasn’t part of their plan for me, so my parents were not sure if it was the best choice for me. Not to mention the countless years of education and money that had to be invested into this, which only added onto their stress. However, once I explained to them the main reason behind my reason for this, they soon accepted it, and began to support my journey.

  • Renowned Literary Critic, 

  • Prisha Pachpande


Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 4, 2024 at 7:14 PM

    I thought this was super insightful. I could relate to it too since my dad's also a software engineer and my mom's an accountant, but they've always wanted me to go into med. I really liked your use of questions in the second paragraph; it was super creative!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bizarre Take #7 - Diving Deeper into the World of Dreams with my Buddy Hughes!

Image
Bizarre Take #7 - Diving Deeper into the World of Dreams with my Buddy Hughes! For this week’s blog, we were assigned to research some more poems by renowned author Langston Hughes, and dive deeper into its meaning. When I was researching, a poem quickly caught my eye. It was titled “Harlem”. Now, my first thought was immediately the Harlem Renaissance, and as my interest was obviously peaked, I decided to choose this as my poem. While annotating I noticed several clever word and language choices Hughes pursued throughout this poem. Hughes opens with a rhetorical question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” This gives the audience something to think about and explore throughout the rest of the poem before he builds up to the main theme. For example, he utilized quite a lot of figurative language, such as similes, when he wrote “like a raisin in the sun”. This use of similes compared the idea of dreams to various different items, such as a shriveled up raisin to represent a broken drea...
Read more

Bizarre Take #1: Idealization of Death

Image
Bizarre Take #1:Idealization of Death Death is a very interesting yet daunting concept. I mean, when the topic is brought up, usually the whole room goes silent and an awkward sense of eeriness spreads across the room. No one really talks about it, and usually people find a way to slip into another conversation. But as time has gone on, we have become so desensitized to the notion of death that it is simply characterized as a part of life. Not the end of life, just a second half to it. After our life is over, we get a new chance to live. A new chance to redo what we want and maybe approach things differently. At least I like to think of death this way. Not just something that announces the end, but as something that invites a new path. This exact theory is what feeds into my fantasies and lets me make up stories about the dead coming to life, through shadows. (you have definitely seen this image in your dreams somewhere, don't lie!) In English Class, we talked about “Postcards from...
Read more

Think Abstract! :)

Image
Metrophobia. An irrational fear of poetry. It sounds kind of absurd -- how can someone be afraid of words stringed together on a page? However, it may be a bit more common than you think. Many people tend to resist poetry, shy away from it at times. Something about this art form, so cryptic yet intimidating, scares people away from its beauty. The Road Not Taken. Written by Robert Front, this poem is regarded as a classic amongst many, having deep meaning within its stances. A poem that first stuck out to me when I read it. At first, I wasn't sure how to interpret its essence, as I quickly got hung up on the direct meaning of the words. I fixated my attention on the words, for example on the line,  To where it bent in the undergrowth;, or the line,  And both that morning equally lay.  I forced myself to try to understand what these lines meant. I think that's one of the ways we self-sabotage our ability to understand poems. We look for direct meaning in something, taking ...
Read more