Burnt Out

I'm all for self exploration, and for the past years, that's all I've ever been doing. In the beginning of the year, I'd been semi-lectured by a professor about not having decided on a specialization. But it's not like I haven't tried. I'd been trying to get a feel for which communication field I was more attuned to and I can't quite get exactly which field I'd do best in. In fact, I'm starting to feel as if I don't have what it takes to be the best in anything.

Growing up, I'd wanted to be many things, but before everything, I wanted to be a painter. Then I wanted to be a cartoonist, and was always drawings pictures with stories. I'd started painting oil portraits at 7.

And then life happened. I couldn't afford art materials anymore and could only afford pencils. I stopped painting, learned editorial cartooning, but even then, life was still getting to me. There were more critics than support, and the constant nagging by almost everyone that art would get you hungry and that comfort meant a job behind a desk and a steady pay made me give up.

When I was choosing a course, my options were architecture, psychology and masscomm. When people from high school would ask why I didn't take up fine arts, I'd say there wasn't any money in it.

Isn't it unfortunate when you find out that the option you closed off would have been better than the seemingly better option at the time? I'm finishing masscomm in a year and a half, and it's not because I was bad at majors or anything. It's just that I feel as if I'd just learned the basics to everything and not enough to be intermediate at anything. Or maybe my standards are too high.

In arts on the other hand, given the proper training, I could have focused on conceptual art. Drawing, at the very least, is skills-based. You tell me what to draw and I'll draw it for you. As long as I know how to draw. But I dropped my pencil a long time ago. I'd stopped rabidly drawing from days on end as if that was the only thing I could do. I figured if I had taken up an art course, I could have gone back. The pressure from a school environment would have prompted me to hone my skills, inspiration or no, the way warmages are taught to wear armor while casting spells. The weight would be difficult in the beginning, but it would breed discipline.

But then again, would doing Concept Art for a living pay? My art-school dean friend says it does. As long as you were willing to please the customer (learning to sell your skills and not your soul). And as long as you don't hope for work in this country, because we're going hungry, and the people actually earning here are in the business of the living and the dead. It's too late to find out if I have any leanings towards medical courses, I'm not about to become an embalmer, and there's too much competition in the food business. Blah, everything's a gamble, but that's another story.

But what are my other options? Or what options do I still really have now that independence is breathing down my neck?

There's also film, but even that seems bleak. The Philippines' movie scene is terribly dark. If you aren't making easy to swallow-escapist movies, you go nowhere. Im an escapist, but Im told my concepts are too cerebral for the masses. And film is a collaborative medium. If you can't work with people, you're doomed. I'm semi antisocial. And my experiences with Bida Complex, though far too little for me to actually judge, kinda tell me Im going to find it difficult to adjust.

I feel blind. I know there are difficulties whatever path I choose, but one can't help wanting to figure out where one would least suck, and try hard enough NOT to suck, so that in the end, you can say that you at least tried your best, despite your best not being enough.

These are times I curse my artistic forebearers and wish I'd been more left-brained.