It would be futile to write about my year and
create a summary to compress my 2012. Honestly, I am personally unable to
remember most of what is supposedly shareable that happened to me last year and
I do not find it ideal to welcome the new year by recounting whatever the
lapses of my memory have missed.
I have decided to share something I personally
find as earth-shaking, monumental, deracinating, and brave to celebrate a new
year.
 |
| From a restaurant I ate at with good friends. They closed after a while though but the place was a beauty. |
I shifted out of
premed.
I have been a science junkie since elementary when
a psychological test confirmed the disillusionment of my childhood: I am
scientifically inclined and gifted, at least to a certain extent. Apart from
tearing my head apart grasping the concept of multiplication that decreases
(when multiplying a whole number by a fraction<1), I underwent separate
training in the mathematics and sciences for competitions. It was later agreed
that going on to a specialized (and exclusive) science high school was the best
for my future.
Come high school, I was intent on failing every
subject. It was a struggle that I always was convinced will never be worth it.
A foreshadowing maybe. When my grades did climb, it was because I was enjoying
introductory mechanics in physics, the kind of enthusiasm good enough to
overflow towards other “lesser” courses. Lost in it all, I decided I wanted to
become a doctor.
Everyone I knew, or my closest friends at least,
all wanted to become medical doctors. My parents and even the extended family
joined the chorus. "Be a doctor! Be a doctor!". The cooing dug
a hole I immediately fell in.
Getting into a premed courses in all the schools
I applied to, I was convinced that it was meant to be. I even bought my own
stethoscope a few months before with the excuse it was required for a
co-curricular activity. Finally, I was done with high school, proudly waving a
less-than-average report card.
As if just an extension of the four years in high
school, college became a torment.
I believed the hell would be over once I step
into a university, pursuing a concentration of my own choosing. I was wrong. I
chose premed and I wasn't enjoying myself. In fact, I would rather bury myself
in dusty piles of books about Sylvia Plath, a poet who has always fascinated me
since high school, than go to class. I spent sleepless nights of
allergen-triggered asthma mustering over details of her life, definitely
irrelevant to whatever battery of tests my premed degree deemed necessary. In
times of trouble where there seems no escape, I transport into a different
existence mumbling “Marble-heavy, a bag
full of God” as if the beautiful feeling of the phrase rolling off the
tongue is the taste of salvation.
Of course, my grades turned out to be very
nauseating, even for my desensitized self.
Partly because I couldn't imagine myself ending
my career in the academe with a tragic report card, and largely because I was
sure that I couldn't be a doctor, and couldn't stand anymore the rigidity of
science (the ultimate desire for a certain truth), I decided to shift out.
I was prepared if I sensed defeat or
disappointment from my parents. Who wouldn't parade a doctor son? And
strangely, it is so easy for me to imagine the emotions of having a son who
grew up playing doctor suddenly deciding to become a hobo.
I did not exactly decide to be a hobo but it is a common
joke around my new classmates here in the university. A career in English
literature, although undeniably hopeful, is currently a financial desert. My
materialistic tendencies were also one of the strongest weights that kept me in
premed.
Although now, with a
wonderful professor who guides me into getting lost in T. S. Eliot’s words,
introduces me to Milan Kundera, keeps me safe from Madame Bovary’s seduction,
and challenging me with the densest sentences I have ever seen, I couldn’t be
any happier. I have this belief that in my struggles defining what I really
want from all the external forces, I acquired early onset identity crisis. I
had a hard time pointing out where I was in life but now, as a literature major
learning an average of five new words a day, I seem more optimistic and it’s
not just because of the bliss that baptizes every good decision.
There is one certain
thing that I learned from this whole mess I have created (which I kind of
cleaned up afterwards): discernment is not easy for everyone.
Unfortunately, I think
I’m one of the tougher cases. The world is so full of external pressures that
it becomes hard to define where yourself ends and other people begin but it is
possible and it all begins with a boldness, a certain courage to look in the
mirror and dig deep (eek! sentimental!). Of course, there is also conscience. I
think there is genetic precedence in our desire to protect ourselves. I was
shredding myself through something that I knew wasn’t really for me, it was
destroying me instead of sharpening the mass inside my head. If all of these
are false, there is one thing in me that made me jump out of my hole:
conscience.
