Who has the right to dictate our lives with such conformity?

Lately, I've been feeling the intense crunch of figuring out my life. I second guess the importance of my major in my life until I can be absolutely sure, if only for a few weeks, that what I am doing at this moment is cohesive with the things that I value and the way I see my life working. In actuality, it shouldn't really matter. My mother majored in history, and yet, she ended up being a technology manager. My mother and my brother are pushing for me to get an internship next summer when I've actually never held a paying job and really don't have any motivation to get one.

So I ask again, Who has the right to dictate our lives with such conformity? The careers that I'd actually be motivated to do would either pay next to nothing or pay millions. Who has the money and the time to travel around the world photographing different cultures? I feel as though my choices are not as easy as others. They do not fall into the categories of regular jobs. Instead, I have to create these careers to live off of, both in physical monetary values and inner spiritual values, with no framework.

I'd rather tell my mother these things. I'd rather tell society these things. That happiness cannot fit into a 9-5 work day. That it's better to live a happy, simple life in my eyes than to live a complicated but fulfilling life in theirs. But like Lisa Parker's "Snapping Beans", I am the girl that cannot tell the great mysteries and conflicts of my mind to my mother, even when we're close, picking green beans in the summertime and drowning the japanese beatles in soapy water by the pool in our backyard.

I'd rather not be telling lies about my ideas of my life to strangers in order to keep things simple. I'd rather not be the girl sitting in the guidance counselor's office in sixth grade telling this strange woman the first career that comes into my mind because I had no idea. After a while I have to wonder what lines become blurred, and what I actually have a passion for and what I've told myself I have a passion for.

The things that I love to do cannot easily be manuvered into careers. I have a high creativity complex that seems to dictate my life. I love to have conversations with people, one on one, with hardly any barriers separating our thoughts and words. "It was what I was born for- to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world." I am an observer, mostly. I view the world through my unique eye. To use all of these things together is, by far, my most challenging adventure because I have to create this life for myself from stratch. There is no framework to go by, no already created careers that fall almost perfectly in place. I am the playtpus that clearly mammal, yet distinctly different, and in order to be happy, I have to be in the water instead of on land.