Can I Interest You in Everything, All of the Time?

Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham

Storyboard sketch for a 10th grade Media Arts project - 12/15/2023, sketched on iPad with Procreate

Perhaps this is just plain privileged snootiness coming from an individual of my background, but the greatest tragedy I've ever faced is choosing between the many passions I'd harbored as a child. I understand that even this internal conflict I had was a result of socioeconomic privileges I had since birth (having an economically stable background that allowed my parents to help me explore many different hobbies and possible future aspirations), and I'm grateful that I got to experience so many things and even have the chance to choose between them. This is just a piece of writing reflecting on my personal experience during these times of decisions.

Process of Elimination

I was told in my freshman year of high school that anything I do should now be completely geared towards going to college. That meant any and all projects, essays, artworks, and even relationships must be carefully considered and weighed upon some looming invisible scale-of-usefulness-towards-applications. To be honest, I didn’t care much about the limitations this hovering thought posed, since I had a great sense of motivation and ambition. I, as did many of my peers, wholeheartedly agreed to the restrictions given, always prioritizing, choosing, and eliminating.

But now, well into my junior year, the weight of the words I had to swallow down, the passions I had to sacrifice, and the relationships I couldn’t invest my time into have finally crept up. The image I had cautiously crafted of myself was for the sole purpose of being a “comprehensible” person on the few sheets of paper my school would eventually send to some other school in a foreign country so that they could judge, select, and eliminate. 

I look around and can see us as who we are aside from the papers, juniors who once were freshmen, reprimanded then to “focus now, you’re going to become an adult soon and you need to learn how to prioritize”. Perhaps we are all experiencing the same sense of dysphoria. What about the other parts that make us? The ones that were torn out from what we now define as our identity, buried with shaking hands like some time capsule that would never be searched for again? Will they never get a chance to shine, to dig their roots into the harsh ground, and yearn for us to turn back and give them the attention they need to develop?

If I had chosen any of the other eliminated saplings of interest to concentrate on, I would have grown to be a completely different person. It could have been piano, singing, coding, debate, or some other activity I believed was worthwhile. Any one of those passions, if given the chance, would have been able to latch on to the soil of my mind, growing eagerly on their roots, unlike a childhood hobby destined to wither away. Yet, I chose art as my priority, and as I climbed the ladder of seniority in school, the time I could afford to spend on my “other interests” naturally decreased. 

The process of elimination that followed was expected but still agonizing. 

Michelangelo once said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”. When the final sculpture is revealed, all the unused, chiseled-out remainders of the block are not presented at all. The stone must have had different parts, textures, colors, and imperfections that could all have become something more, essences of their own. But we are taught to only look at the statue, and even Michelangelo seems to have forgotten about the leftovers too. 

I want to think my forgotten interests and eliminated passions are equally as precious as the statue I’m discovering. I am taught by society that the tormenting process of elimination we must go through to select and develop our true “priority” is what makes it so beautiful. That we must focus on one essence of our multifaceted identities to express ourselves completely, and that any other subjects of affection must be swept over to the side, or completely abandoned if needed. 

What purpose is there to learn, if you must give up midway? 

Why explore if you know you’ll have to choose and forget all else soon after?

Note

It's been a few months since I wrote this. The pain of the 'process of elimination' has subsided a bit, maybe because junior year is just making me too busy to contemplate such past events, but I understand that it was necessary to make these choices then. It would have been a catastrophe to go through this semester if I had maintained ALL my childhood passions. But it's still sad to think that that's something I just have to come to terms with.