forging your own path
walk the tight rope: a realist or dreamer [10]:
“There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.” - J.K. Rowling
I found this quote from a fiction titled Chemistry by Weike Wang this past weekend. This short book recounts the experience of a Chinese American Chemistry PhD student - uncertain of her liking for chemistry, standing at crossroads when her long time loving boyfriend proposed and despite loving him, she couldn’t say yes.
I don’t think I can ever get enough of the perennial stories of young people facing life crises; this might very well be because I am in one myself.
In school, you have milestones and clear timelines to look forward to: winter break, spring break, summer break. You have small summer internships of sophomore year, big summer internships of junior year and a capstone class before graduation. You have students’ clubs and events, you have an academic calendar with clear denoting of when exactly you are going to move on to the next big thing. The world is your oyster.
The moment my full time job starts, life seems to freeze. Days pass without me acknowledging or fully comprehending what has happened. A sense of meaning slips through my brain like a bouncy grape jelly (Phineas and Ferb’s gelatin monster) I panic and list out more things to be involved in than I am humanly capable of: writing weekly, podcasting, online courses, may be starting a food asmr tiktok, sustainable investing, signing up for a half marathon, sending my articles to different publications.
I don’t recall exactly where I read this but there is a statistic that says men who are about to turn 50 increasingly sign up for marathons. It might be because they are intimidated by the prospect of growing older on a biological sense and need to get their minds off it; Or that the 50 mark seems too spine-chilling to not check off any grand goal so marathons are in order to prove to the world that they too can conquer a feat. Either way, I can very much relate.
I have always been a dreamer for as long as I could remember. When I was six or seven, I loved to sit atop of our family’s stairs that look into the street to just observe and dream. I remember seeing a sole painter, a rare sighting, across the street. He was mixing colors and then creating careful strokes of yellow and orange hues of autumnal leaves on a canvas. I was in awe. After that random day, I decided I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be engrossed in something that I forgot the whole world exists. I wanted to live in beauty. I wanted to live in art. I wanted to live in melodies.
I took drawing lessons and soon grew into an avid drawer, despite not being the best. I drew dozens and then hundreds of pictures, the latter not necessarily better than the former but I adore the process. I also like to read, capable of finishing an entire book in a day, something hard to come by as an adult. I wrote poems to my dad (lots of them) to remind him of his familial duties (a true feminist I was). I created little magazines with doodles and fake stories inspired by characters from my favorite Disney Channel movies and my many comic books. I wrote to tween magazines editors, read each publication again and again and collected heaps of them to store in the compartment above my bed.
It truly was an honor and privilege to douse in dreams, creativity and art as a kid. Fifteen years later, that dreamy quality still lives in me, albeit a bit rusty and jaded. I write and write, without looking back. Few things can provide me with undivided attention and so called ‘flow’ state that writing offers.
I long for writing and doing creative things on a daily basis. I recently developed a mild obsession with Cafe Maddy Podcast, a podcast produced by a Korean American dentist turned food videographer. Her stories of how she stumbled into the freelance world and the unexpected growth trajectory have given me a lot of comfort; not because I think that one day I can be as tiktok famous as Maddy but more so because I can restore my faith that things will work out for me. That I might one day be genuinely fulfilled doing the things that I do on the daily.
As for now, I might have to live with being a realist.