In first grade, I thought it would be really fantastic to be a teacher during the school year and an actress during the summer. Apparently, the battle for my attention between my left-brain and right-brain started young. For about 20 years, I’ve let my left brain win most of the important battles - like my college major and career path - because I was usually told that all those artsy things I liked were “great hobbies.”
But where do you draw the line between a hobby and a passion? Lately, I’ve been feeling like I have an unrequited love affair with some of these “hobbies,” and I think I owe it to myself to explore them a little more freely. I can’t shake the feeling that I am missing out on the great loves of my life. I feel restless, unravelled, undone. I know it’s a little nuts to personify and romanticize the Hobbies/Activities box on my Facebook profile, but what if it’s like this:
“A - The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul
Q - It always happens?A - If we’re lucky. And if we let ourselves be blind.Q- Instead of watching out?A - Instead of always watching out.” - Metamorphoses, Mary ZimmermanSo what if love is just whatever fills your soul and makes you feel complete?
This summer, I’m going to stop watching out and let my soul do a little wandering. I registered for an art class at Creative Alliance today (which has a “critiques” component which scares the shit out of me) and I’ll take it from there. Regardless, I am going to stop de-legitimizing myself conquer my fear of failure - because failure is a good thing, anyway, right? Growth and progress and all that crap.
Two years ago, I wrote this in Berlin and I keep coming back to it:
Wednesday… I went to see the Hannes Kilian photography exhibit at the Martin Grobius museum, which totally blew my mind. Kilian is well-known for his theatrical photography (mostly ballets) as well as travel photography, which are my two of my favorites. It was such an inspiring body of work and made me physically ache for a career as a photographer. As I walked through the photographs, I began to have a slight identity crisis, during which I reflected on how it was possible that I still wanted to have so many vastly different careers. This was my first grade mentality and it seems that not much has changed. How many lives can you successfully lead in a lifetime without compromising yourself to mediocrity?
[Thursday]… I went to the Holocaust Memorial, which is totally different than I expected, and the National Photography Museum. The museum was featuring the life’s work of Helmut Newton, who is this incredible artist known as The Dark Prince of photography because of lot of his work is really controversial/erotic and features a lot of nudes. However, I… was once again trying to figure out how to work more photography into my life.”
This summer, I go blind.
