I found the Life Sciences program to be stressful and draining and ended up leaving, to go into the Arts instead.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”
- James Baldwin
Stories - in books and movies or in textbooks - have been the interest central to my life, I grew up a bit lonely and at times feltI was given a fixed ‘script’ by society that I couldn’t play well, so I turned to fantasy books and science fiction movies and spent my time in imagined worlds instead.
This evolved as I journaled, wrote poetry and fervently participated in creative writing, debate and craft-making events around me. I came to understand the world around me, people’s hearts and minds and inner lives, through this lens; I understood myself and found empathy, catharsis and liberation. I felt like I was learning to live again, take my true first steps, and this time around I could write a ‘script’ of my own and go into the world how I wanted.
Language changed everything for me, in terms of self-realisation and expression. I think it is one of the most fundamental forces of human growth and development; we came to survive and evolve as Homo sapien sapiens because we would share what we learnt - about fighting off enemies and catching prey and braving the winters - with one another. We outlived species bigger than us, or having more brute force, or even more intelligence, because we learnt to communicate.
In a deeper sense, creativity is what being human is; to sing however out of pitch or tune, is to be human. To make something original is to reach out, across space and time, to another.
Like Ethan Hawke has said, most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live- until their father dies, they go to a funeral, lose a child, someone breaks their heart and you’re suddenly desperate to make sense of this life. And “that’s when art is not a luxury- it’s actually sustenance. We need it.”, or more succinctly like Bertolt Brecht said, “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing, about the dark times.”
So, I want to spend a life learning and creating art. I’m interested in history because I want to understand the context of this present moment, to appreciate the rise and fall of civilisations and the wars and revolutions that brought us here, but also to know what it was like to exist as an ordinary person- 3000 years ago, 150 years ago. I’m also interested in sociology, anthropology and political science so I can understand human behaviour better, the reasoning and science behind our societies.
Pursuing a Bachelor of Arts, I would get to dedicate my life to this passion, that has been a witness to my every struggle and anchored me to what matters. I want to be able to analyse and dissect texts, be exposed to great art and stories and learn about different time periods and movements in philosophy and culture. I think I’m well-suited to observe the world and take notes on it but ultimately I want to offer the same comfort and hope to others that I have found in the arts and humanities, through writing and teaching, and adding to our existing research and understanding of these fields.
If these 18 years have been a journey in self-discovery, I hope it gets even more interesting from here, and I can find meaning and belonging; and I am positive that if I could find a place in this program, it would make all the difference, in this journey.
Life has taken me a lot of places, looking for myself. Trying to put myself back together. And I am grateful to get to be around for this spectacular range of emotion, all these stories and lessons. And I think I am finding my way.