"Never stop imagining. You're not mad. Don't ever believe anyone who tells you a thing so unjust and spiteful. Write."
From the Land of the Moon
This past year has been a very long journey of soul searching that consisted of: accepting my past, acknowledging the good and bad of myself, identifying my strengths and weaknesses, and refining my morals to build a strong foundation on which I can stand firmly for the rest of my life. I know more today of myself than I knew yesterday, and I know less today than I will tomorrow, but that is the blessing of life that compels me to move forward.
When it comes to planning for my career, I have often cowered away from the aspect of doing just one thing for the rest of my life. It reminds me of when I was in middle school and I was using AOL Instant Messaging for the first time. I spent over an hour trying to find the right screen name to express myself. It had to be the right one, because it was meant to be an expression and the true definition of myself for an indefinite amount of time. It had to be just right. Now I realize that I was beyond silly to invest so much time into an AIM screen name. Maybe because I ended up having about sixteen different screen names throughout the years. Or the fact that the name I go by in my everyday life isn't even my legal name on paper so who am I put so much value in a virtual name? Or maybe it was the fact that
I was the one making the decision for myself.
I grew up having my entire life planned out for me. Being the youngest of three and the only girl, I had a lot riding on me as what my dad called "The Diamond of the Family" and their last hope for success. It was very easy to live the routine life that almost collapsed under the pressure of school, violin lessons, homework, tennis practice, SAT prep classes, and piano lessons. I spent every summer either out of the state or out of the country. Don't get me wrong. I am not complaining about being brought up as the golden child by a set of parents who loved me more than anything in the world and wanted nothing but the best for me. However, raising what they hoped to be the perfect child meant cutting all distractions.
No boys, no television, and friends were only seen in moderate. My life may have been easy, but it was far from exciting. One might ask, "How would you have known what 'exciting' really was, when you lived such a mundane life?" The answer, lied in the hundreds of books that I read throughout the years.
Reading was my outlet, and it trained my mind to remain patient and at peace with the knowledge that excitement was in my horizon ready to be seized whenever I came up with enough courage to stand up against the plan my parents had laid out for my life. The plan was for me to attend UC Irvine right out of high school, study some sort of science during my undergrad, and attend medical school to follow my dad's footsteps and become a successful surgeon. Since the day I graduated high school, I feel like I was a constant disappointment with every step I took that strayed from the plan my parents worked so hard to create for me. I didn't know what I wanted my life to be like, but I knew I couldn't continue on floating through the predestined haze that my parents had laid out.
As much as I love my parents with all my heart, breaking away from them has been the best decision I've ever made. In my past posts, I have written about the struggles that I have overcome over these past years, and how I am actually very grateful for all of the adversity I have faced, because it has truly refined my character throughout the years. I have been in the pursuit of my Bachelor's Degree for over five years now. During those five years, it was as if I was constantly trying to grasp on to a dream that I couldn't truly identify. It's like that morning after you have a really impacting dream, and the more you try to recall it, the more it slips away from you. I knew I had aspirations apart from what my parents had intended for me, but it took me a long time to recall what it was. After a great deal of inward reflections, I realized that I cannot be successful if I am not doing what I truly love.
So that, my friends, is why I wrote this long and daunting post. To introduce you to the new direction in which my blog will be taken as a place where I can come to practice my writing skills. Hopefully, it will be a a chronicle of my growth not just as a woman, but as a writer as well.
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