I have recently grown an attachment to the state of Oddfellows Hall: the mold, the building feeling as if it will fall apart, the once-suspected gas leaks and the state of the boilers. But I’ve been thinking more deeply about this entire situation. When I go to class in Oddfellows, I think intently about the perception of the humanities, and how this building is an inanimate object that both beautifully and sadly represents them.
Oddfellows reminds me of when I tell people I’m pursuing a career in English. They tell me it’s a dying field, and I’ll never make enough money to support a family. I think about the state of Oddfellows and how it won’t ever be fixed. I feel the building is a lost cause, after all, so there’s no reason to fix something that’s so far gone. The humanities aren’t taken seriously now, so perhaps there’s no point in taking them seriously ever again.
When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a mathematician because people told me I’d make the most money there. I hated math. I told people I wanted to read and learn forever, but they told me that I had more potential, so I settled for math. That’s where the money was. I had potential to do something great, people would say, so wasting my talents in English education stupid, and unwise. But they’d be reading a book as they talked to me or watching the news or praying to their God and I couldn’t help but wonder what they had meant by “wasted potential.” They were utilizing the resources given to them by the field they’d insisted was unwise to pursue. They had been disproving what they were saying our entire conversation; the humanities were their news, their study of their God, their books, their history. The humanities are the foundation of all the things they love.
I guess I just don’t understand the hatred for humanities. When I’m in groups of people, they tell me they love to read books for fun. I’m not sure they know that a person, a professional in that field, is writing those books. Someone who loved being in the humanities so much they dedicated months to writing and only writing.
I think a lot about when I talk to others about my creative writing major. When I tell them I’m struggling academically, they remind me that it can’t be hard. I tell them that I’ve fallen behind, and they say, “well, at least you don’t have biology.” I talk to people about my future senior project, and I’m diminished. I’m told they wish they were doing my major because my project sounds so much easier. “I could’ve been so good at that,” they say.
Perhaps they could have been good at it. But, there’s this weird assumption that studying a humanities course is taking the easy way out. There’s these videos on TikTok, and these people will ask college students what the stupidest major is. The answer is almost always “communications.” One time, though, I saw a girl who answered “communications” while she was listening to a podcast. Isn’t that just hypocrisy? It makes me wonder if we react in such ways to the humanities to feel a part of something, to hop on a bandwagon that shouldn’t exist.
I love my major. I love being a writer. I want this to be my career; I want to publish books that won’t make me any money and teach other college students that it’s OK to love something people don’t want you to love. I do, though, wish we lived in a world where money wasn’t the driving force for our actions. I wish we could talk about our interests without being told we aren’t going to make it. When people announce they’re on the premedical track, there’s an incredibly large commotion for them, which is well deserved, but I watch from the background and wonder why I don’t get the same excitement. I’m pursuing something I’m incredibly passionate about, and something I’m good at. Why am I looked at as if I’m making a mistake?
I walk through Oddfellows with love deeply infused into my bones. There is a sacredness in that building. There is appreciation for the arts, walls and walls of proof that the humanities have always been a compelling field and most importantly there’s a community of others who believe in the art of manipulating language. My conversations in Oddfellows will be ingrained in my mind forever: that my major is not silly, I am doing the right thing and it’s OK to struggle in something I’m good at.
I love my major, and I always will. I hope we’ll all learn to appreciate how beautiful it is to love something so much that money doesn’t matter. Take that humanities class; you won’t regret it.