I think I’ve just had an epiphany. To some of you (my three readers) this might come off as obvious, but it wasn’t for me until now.
As some of you may know, I’ve been struggling with school for the past year. I’ve been spending the last twelve months staring at a computer screen for hours on end, paralyzed, dreaming of other stuff I’d like to be writing instead (or singing, or drawing). I have found no remedy for this paralysis so far. I like to call it the Stasis because it reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”. Some would rather call it stupidity, though, and some laziness. Some have thought less of me for not caring to read Derrida hard enough to understand his Différance, and even I have come to doubt my own capacities for not feeling like doing actual literature-related work. After all, literature is my major, and it has been so for the past seven years or more. What you may not know is that I wasn’t exactly an English major when I started college in Iowa. I was a Writing major. I took a poetry workshop and a fiction workshop, along with Shakespeare and other English literature subjects. I got my poetry published in the school magazine. Overall I was happy with that, because my ultimate dream was to have my stories published. But then I went back home and all that got shut down, leading me into another kind of stasis: one where I was a good student, but a terrible writer. In fact, I didn’t write anything at all, except for this blog and the one in Spanish. I distrusted my creative abilities so bad that, in terms of drawing, I wouldn’t sketch anything beyond the blank spaces around my class notes.
Now that I have spent almost four years of my life in almost complete seclusion, I have come to understand lots of things about myself. And the landslide of epiphanies is frightening.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated with computers and space. I wanted to become an astronomer or a software engineer. However, I didn’t become either. I’ve been trying to find out lately why I didn’t end up a scientist if I watched Cosmos and read Cimpec magazine and programmed as a child. Was I some kind of failed promise to the world of science? However, as I gazed at a breathtaking picture of M42 the other day, I understood: I’m content with the beauty of it all. It is for astrophysicists to explain the hierarchical formation of galaxies, but it is for me to picture them in my head, and turn those pictures into words, and let others dream my dreams, and perchance even incite them to have dreams of their own.
Maybe this stasis is my mind speaking to me, begging me to pull off from a path pointing to what I should become, dragging me back to my real passion. I shall not regard it as failure if I don’t become a researcher. However, it has been very stupid of me to ignore the voices that have been speaking to me since such an early age. I mean, I relinquished all forms of social life to write a novel for two years during high school and I still don’t get it?
Maybe it’s not a mistake on my behalf. Maybe I was meant to walk this long path in order to finally gather the strength to walk into the void of accepting myself for who I am and not who I’m supposed to be.
Having said this, on to the pen, to the guitar, to the sketchbook!