It wasn’t until years later, right before I graduated school and started telling people what I wished to do with my life, that I realized how horribly things could have gone for me had it been any other discipline that I had fallen for as I had for Psychology. The only thing that had sustained my interest in the field and my grit to study it was this romantic idea of it that had been planted in my head by my mother years ago. Unfortunately, that is how most people see it. It is unfortunate because there is so much more to it that just learning about why people do what they do.

There have been multiple times when people have asked me to read their minds. It is not even annoying anymore. I just feel bad that that is how my discipline is viewed.  Innumerable times my father has asked me to “stop showing off my psychology skills” when we are having an argument (and mind you I am winning), thinking that through my evil psychological prowess I have somehow learned how to push his buttons and then slowly figure out all his dark secrets.

Psychology, however magical and interesting it may seem, has its own dirty groundwork that you have to do before you are even close to explaining the behaviours of others or understanding them. You’ll have to study statistics and the tiniest details of the human brain with big, difficult names, study extensively the details of research methodology, and write endless reports on the research you conduct. It will take you an entire semester to understand the meaning of what the word “psychological disorder” itself means, a year to settle the nature/nurture debate and a lifetime to decide whether psychology is a science or not. It isn’t ‘fun’ and ‘cool’ all the time. It is boring and miserable too. It does provide you with some answers but it does not make you all-knowing.

Slogging through all of this can make you fall in love with this romantic idea of psychology, though. That is what happened to me. It was this one day when I was sitting in class, and I thought, “The brain is the most efficient machine in the world, cloaked in the most secrets.” And I was in love again; the cheesy kind. The kind I felt that fateful day as a thirteen year old. But this time it felt justified. I had started seeing the reality of what psychological theory was and what it meant to be a psychologist. To put it dramatically - I had seen the dark side but had chosen to fall in love with the good one.