My entire life, until pretty recently, I've wanted to shape my career around some kind of creative action. When I was younger I had many different things lined up, as most kids do. I wanted to be a chef, and an author, and a movie star, and very briefly, a princess. Aside from being royalty, all of those things would have required me to do something you can't learn from a textbook. You can learn to cook, but to be a chef worth her salt (excuse the pun, I couldn't resist,) you need to be able to make something original. Being an author or a notable actress require skills along those same lines. Making art in the real world is something I never questioned; I thought it was just another type of job I could have, like being a doctor or a businesswoman.
Getting older sucks, for a lot of reasons. The first and most awful one that I can think of is that becoming an adult usually means having to admit that you need to stop dreaming and start doing, and sometimes, that means giving up on some dreams. That is my biggest fear. I know what I would like to do, and I know what I should do, and they aren't the same. And so far, I haven't found a way to combine them. Maybe college will help me with that, but I don't see very many options as of yet. This isn't to say that creativity doesn't play a role in most careers, but for me, it's much easier to be qualitative than quantitative, so to speak. I can't stand math, and while I'm fascinated by science, I know myself enough to know that I wouldn't be good at it as a profession. So that leaves me with the humanities and fine arts. Both of which I much prefer anyway. If it wasn't obvious by now, I love to write. That's something that's never changed. So why can't I listen to that instinct and pursue it? For conventional reasons, of course - money.
All jobs require risk, requisites, and responsibility. In this day and age, though, careers in the STEM field come with a certain kind of job security, because that is the category with the most demand. People look at musicians, writers, and visual artists with disdain and pity until they make it big, and only then is it socially appropriate to give them credit for their choice of profession.
My problem isn't that I want to do one thing but am being forced into doing another - it's that I see the value of both options, and can't pick. Part of me knows that I would make a good lawyer, and that's validated by the fact that nearly all of my friends and family tell me they can see me as a lawyer. No one tells me they can see me doing what I think I actually want to do, which is writing. They like my writing, and they compliment me, but when I bring up that I maybe want to be a writer or journalist, there isn't as much enthusiasm. It's understandable, albeit a little disheartening. No one thinks writing is a profitable career unless you're J.K. Rowling (who also wasn't given much credit until she hit it big, just saying). All I want is to wholeheartedly pursue what I actually want to do, but in order to do so, I need to figure out what that is.
Vincent Van Gogh, my favorite painter, once said "I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance." This couldn't be more true, coming from someone who can attest to a similar situation. I want a job not solely for the prospective profit - I want to spend my life doing something I can be proud of, knowing I put everything I have into making something important, that I also care about. I'm willing to work for it, but I'm terrified that nothing will come of it. I'm also scared of disappointing all the people who thought so highly of me and believed in my potential. But there comes a certain point in a person's life when you have to realize that you can't live your life for other people. You can value their opinions, and consider them carefully, but at the end of the day, your life is your own and you're the one that's going to look back on it one day and either be disappointed or not. That's been the hardest thing for me to grasp. Technically, I'm an adult now, and I need to start making these kinds of decisions. But at heart, I am a child, who wants to make childish decisions with reckless abandon. I just want to go back to when being a princess was a prospective career option, damn it!
Well, now that this post has become sufficiently long enough to become a chapter in my future memoir, I will leave you with one last quote, because why the hell not?
"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams." -Life of Pi by Yann Martel
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| Where would we be if Van Gogh decided to become a businessman? With a not so starry night, that's where. |
