Intellectual and Preferential Change; or, How To Make Certainty Disappear, Pt. 1
In an effort to explain why exactly I've bounced from concentration to concentration, I've written this...thing. It's very messy since I'm thinking as I'm writing, and I've made no effort to edit it. That said, I'd like to mention that recall bias is a very real thing, and that I am "the easiest person to fool".
One of my mother’s favorite stories about my childhood goes something like this: at a family reunion, my ability to identify letters before my second birthday shocked my entire family. Sometime later, I shocked my father by reading a newspaper article to him at three years old, disproving his idea that I had only memorized my picture books.
This pretty much informed my intellectual life until halfway through high school: I was reading at a college level before middle school, I read whatever I could get my hands on, and I was good with language. Though I had ability with math and science, it was clear that English and Social Studies were my best subjects, and I was expected to go to college for something humanities-related, if not strictly the humanities. (I spent a few years wanting to major in psychology.) I was almost always with a book, and I adored history, though I hated the usual war-focused method. Instead, I wanted to know the why of it, why did these things happen, what was the socio-cultural milieu?
This changed with junior year and the International Baccalaureate program. For the first time, I was fully and directly expected to back up my assertions, with sources or the book we were reading or general scientific consensus, depending on the subject. At the same time, I was realizing my asexuality and doing absolutely tons of research, both scientific and not, in an effort to pick a religion congruent with my values. It wasn’t until after senior year when I finally landed on atheism, but in the meantime I had gained an enormous respect for science and a tendency for the analytical.
The mental and emotional benefits I’d gained from seven years in band originally led me to major in music education, though constant complications and an episode of How I Met Your Mother made me choose an intro course in anthropology as the most interesting thing I could find. The interaction involved in the four-field approach was everything I’d wanted, and I changed my major during the semester.
By this time, though (and this is where everything starts to get messy, including my organization), I’d lost any confidence with my skill in the humanities, realized just how much of a people-person I wasn’t, and reinforced that love for science, and so I chose bioanthropology, thinking I’d go into forensics.