Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise

As I starting typing this blog post, I realized that I may have failed to give the blogosphere a very important piece of information. As of January 17, 2012, I am officially back in college!!

I am still happily working my full-time job, but have started taking night classes. And I am super excited about it!! I am studying psychology, a field I have always been interested in, and hope to eventually work with kids/teens/young adults. I haven't fully decided if I want to be a school counselor, crisis counselor or actual therapist yet - but I think there is time to figure all of that out.

So, in class this week, my professor in my Behavioral Psychology class asked us to write a one page paper analyzing a song that motivates us, and explain why. 

This assignment was basically made for me. 

I thought I'd share my paper with you, dear readers. I haven't even turned it in yet, but I was so darn excited about this assignment, I had to share it. Hopefully my professor doesn't stumble across my blog before I turn it in.  

Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise

by: The Avett Brothers

“There was a dream
One day I could see it
Like a bird in a cage a broke in and demanded that somebody free it
And there was a kid, with a head full of doubt
So I scream till I die and the last of those bad thoughts are finally out.

Decide what to be and go be it.”

I’ve always felt driven or called to help people. When friends or family encounter problems or hard times, they always seemed to migrate towards me. And it was not ever a burden, but a pleasure, to be that for them.  As I’ve grown older, it has expanded to also include my co-workers and, occasionally, strangers.

Right after high school, I tried college. I could give you the slew of reasons why I didn’t finish then. I could tell you about how my parents were getting divorced, that my best friend had tragically died, that my long-term boyfriend (now my husband) and I had parted ways and that I partied too much. And while they are all true, they are all still just excuses. The fact is, I doubted myself. And over time, something terrible happened – almost everyone else started to doubt me too. So, I gave up and took a full-time job, just going through the motions.

One of the few things that keep my soul alive and awake is music; specifically live music. As I grew tired of my routine, I found myself constantly thinking about what I was doing with my life. Shortly after my 28^th birthday, one of my best friends and I went to see The Avett Brothers in concert.  I loved their music for a long time and have sung along to this song a hundred times at least, but that night it’s like I was hearing it for the first time. As “Decide what to be and go be it” hit my ears that night, it all just came down around me. I already knew what I wanted to do (psychology) so I HAD decided what to be; now I had to do what it takes to go be it. Today, in my first semester back in college, when I hear that song it brings me to tears and reminds me to shake my ‘Head Full of Doubt’ and replace it with ‘Road Full of Promise’.