My a-ha moment

When I was in about the 6th grade, I was pretty much the "go-to girl" for advice. As my mom will say, the phone was always ringing off the hook with phone calls from my friends that she finally caved and got me my own line (which I thought I was so cool for). I probably coached my best friend at the time through 20 different break ups, half the time with the same guy. It was 6th grade and the relationships were usually strictly phone and instant messaging, but every break up or "crisis" was treated as such. As I got into high school and things were still the same, people always asking me what they should do about a certain thing, what I honestly thought about the person they were dating, anything, I even helped my friends numerous times pick out what to wear to formals AND did their freaking makeup. During Christmas break of my freshman year, my best friend pointed all this out to me. I had helped him through a bunch of stuff, including a threat to wreck havoc on his cheating girlfriend, took him as my date to a formal so he could be their with his NEW and NICE girlfriend, who had already promised to go as a "date" with one of her female friends that had just been dumped (while I had pneumonia and was thisclose to skipping it all together, because honestly I didn't give two shits about formals and school spirit). He said that I was basically a shrink for all of our friends and joked about it being funny if I started charging for however long they bitched to me and I "helped" them work out whatever they were dealing with. People automatically trusted me with really strange things, and I never felt obligated to tell them something in return for them to gain my trust. So, all in all, I realized around my freshman-sophmore year that I wanted to be a psychologist. It wasn't until this year though that I actually decided that I want to get my doctorate and open my own private practice and work with mainly adults and young adults. I feel fairly certain that it will be hard and I will be in school FOREVER but that's okay, because when I think about myself in about 15 years, I don't want to still be working as a waitress at a 9pm-3am bar. I want to help people, and not for the money, but because I will know at the end of the day that no matter how much or how little I feel the person got out of talking to me, but the fact that they know that they had someone to listen to that wasn't there to judge, or tell them what they were doing wrong, but simply there to listen and help.