in pursuit of purpose

I don’t know how many times I’ve asked myself the question, “What would you do if you could do anything in the world?” Usually the first thing that springs to mind is that if money were no object, I would probably be a perpetual student and traveler, possibly working with dogs on the side (I melt over dogs the way normal people melt over babies. They make me incredibly happy.)

I love fonts/typography, but I’m not especially fond of the idea of graphic design. Computers aren’t really my friend, at it’s not easy to get too emotionally invested in the shapes of letters and numbers.
I like working with people, but only on certain levels and in small, intimate doses. Phones are my enemy. I’m often crippled by social anxiety.

I’m made to create. I know that much. If I couldn’t make something with my hands, I’d be very frustrated and unhappy. But that is so vague. What is it I’m meant to be creating? What art media are available to me? What do I know how to do, or what am I interested in doing? I love my day job; at work I do a small amount of illustrative type work with markers, but that doesn’t necessarily feel like my skill, much less my calling.

I keep trying to paint, but I find that I don’t especially like it. Painting would be fun if it were at the ready all the time. It’s the set-up and cleanup that keep me from starting. I prefer something that I can work on a little at a time, whenever the mood hits, and not feel obligated to put in a lot in one sitting with lots of cleanup. Pastels are pretty good for this, but I feel a little out of my league there…and they, too, are a bit messy.

Drawing is more of a hobby that I like to revisit casually, but I’m daunted by that, too. I can never find a subject that captures my attention enough for me to commit it to a finished work. Trying to put myself in the category of “artist” scares me, frustrates me, and incapacitates me. I always want to ‘do art,’ thinking it will be cathartic, but I inevitably end up sitting at my art desk, confounded by too much freedom. I never know what it is my hands desire to make. It’s kind of like the expression, “My eyes were bigger than my stomach.” I usually feel that my hands are more anxious to create than my mind is.

I enjoy films very much. I would definitely consider film a part of my life. I went to film school and majored in screenwriting. I would someday love to make documentaries, but networking and getting a crew together is neither my forte nor something I’d even care to attempt. If it was just myself with a camera and a subject, that film is getting made. And that film will stay in a closet somewhere, because I’m rather afraid of talking to people. And filmmaking without networking is simply home movies. And that’s fine. I can live with that. Screenwriting and documentary filmmaking didn’t exactly shoot to the forefront of my mind when I started asking myself what I wanted to devote the rest of my life to.

In no particular order, my favorite classes in college were my documentary class, European Cinema, Writing the Scene, Adaptation, Creative Writing, and of course the Torrey Program in which we read Western civilization’s great books. So, writing and reading literature stand out as the things that really make me light up like a firefly. I spend hours listening to podcasts of short stories and mini-documentaries (the latter of which I think I love partly because of how poetically it’s put together—there’s a beautiful rhythm to it). I love watching documentaries on almost any subject, especially if they are done in an artful yet simple way. In bookstores I’m sometimes drawn to the art section, but I think that’s mostly because that’s what I feel like I should be interested in reading about. And I am, sometimes. But I just simply can’t get enough literature. There are more books on my “to read” list than books I’ve read in my life (and I’ve read a LOT of books). I could easily spend my proverbial ten thousand hours reading, but that isn’t actively honing a craft.

Lately I’ve been wondering what I wouldn’t mind spending ten thousand hours perfecting. Drawing and painting didn’t make the cut. I do, however, tend to think artistically in the sense of rhythm of language and beauty of surroundings and situations. Not in a way that I care to replicate on canvas, but rather in words (though that doesn’t usually occur to me in the moment that I’m pondering things). I adore language and words and the way things sound. I love the feel and sound of the keys beneath my fingers, even if nothing terribly profound is appearing on the screen above. And so I think I would gladly write for at least an hour a day for the rest of my life if I allowed myself to think I had anything worth writing.

And with that, I think the last hour of probing my mind has brought me to this conclusion: I truly and desperately want to be a writer. I feel a kindredness with writers (and I feel okay with occasionally taking license and making up words like kindredness). I am emotionally rooted in the world of writers and literature. It resonates with me more than any other interest of mine. Writing allows me to externalize what I value in a way that I cannot in any other medium. Only in story am I able to illuminate the characteristics I admire in my fellow man, and dramatize on a page the scenarios I would either love to see happen or would never dare to enact in the real world. My characters can say and do everything I would ever imagine saying or doing. It is the ultimate catharsis, and it is possible that there is nothing more satisfying to me than creating a world and characters that others can jump into and (one hopes) love. I find that even after writing this bit of nonsense, all feelings of anger and depression that I carried with me earlier in the day have simply faded away and left in their place a relaxed contentedness. I don’t presume to think I could ever be a great writer, but surely my emotional response to the idea of writing is an indication that I ought to try.

Please follow and like us: