Hey, it’s Charles.
I think my father might be right about me. I might be completely useless.
Let me explain. My father is a doctor. Very successful, very respected, very large — the man is over six feet tall and weighs over 300 pounds, and when he is disappointed in you it feels like a building is frowning at you. He has had my life planned out since I was born. Medical school. Doctor. Respectable.
So he sent me to Edinburgh. Best medical school in the country. I tried. I genuinely tried.
Then I watched my first surgery.
There is no anesthesia right now. It does not exist. Surgery in 1825 means they strap the patient down and start cutting while the person is fully awake and screaming. The operation I watched was on a child. I will not describe the details because I do not want to remember them myself. I made it partway through, stood up, walked out of the operating theater, and never went back.
I know that makes me weak by the standards of every other medical student in that building. I do not care. I am not going to stand in a room and listen to a child scream and pretend this is what I am meant to be doing with my life.
So I stopped going to lectures. What I did instead was go outside and collect beetles.
I am not being funny. I am genuinely obsessed with beetles. There are thousands of species, all slightly different, and I find this incredibly exciting. I can spend an entire day in a field turning over rocks and pulling bark off trees and feel like I have accomplished more than a week in the lecture hall. One time I found two rare beetles at once, one in each hand, and spotted a third — so I put one in my mouth to free up a hand. It released some horrible acid on my tongue and I spat it out and lost all three. This is the kind of person I am.
My father found out I had stopped attending medical school. The building frowned at me.
He decided if I was not going to be a doctor, I would become a clergyman. Not because I am particularly religious — I am not — but because in England, being a clergyman is the default career for wealthy sons who have failed at everything else. Nice house in the countryside, a sermon once a week, the rest of your time free. My father figured at least I could not mess that up.
So now I am at Cambridge studying to become a clergyman. I am supposed to be reading theology. Instead I am riding horses, shooting birds, drinking with my friends, and collecting more beetles. One professor told me I have a genuine talent for natural observation. Everyone else thinks I am a rich kid wasting his father’s money, which is not an unfair assessment.
My father wrote me a letter recently. He said:
“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”
The worst part is I cannot really argue with him. I am 22 years old. I have dropped out of one career, I am failing at another, and my greatest accomplishment to date is a beetle collection. I do not know what I am supposed to be doing. I just know that every path laid out for me feels completely wrong.
There is something out there for me. I can feel it. I just have no idea what it is yet.
I will write again if anything changes. Right now I am going to go look for beetles because at least that makes sense to me.
— Charles
