In my face

step back from the window of your vision.

It has become clear to me that my academic journey shall take a detour or has simply hit a dead-end after two back-to-back rejections. While I am not completely dejected, there is no doubt some hard feelings and confusions in mind over the future path. Yet, the hard feeling has translated into something like a "shame-on-me" embarrassment after I hit the new national art museum today. There were few showcase of art students' graduation work on site and most of them were paintings and sculptures. I toured around all the sessions, spent less than 5 seconds at most work only to skim through the title and get a general impression of the piece. But don't get me wrong, they were amazing artwork with thought-provoking ideas. I could not imagine the effort and time that has put into them... but what I could imagine was the self-doubt that many of them have to undergo at some point before the completion of the work. Doubt whether one possesses the talent, doubt whether the dream will come true... This is an unforgiving society - they must have been, and needed to be extremely strong and determined in order to finish their degree. And how could I, who have jumped around different disciplines with no track records of commitment and clear talent, be expected to achieve greatness just because some people around said "you are smart". The silly thing is that I bought in, somehow getting myself to believe that even without a good foundation, I could catch up with the rest because "I am smart". But the sad truth is I am not even that smart to start with. These two rejections dunked on me and have done me good- I've been too lenient on myself, owning to the fortune that life has endowed on me. To elevate my game, I need to be more desperate and I owe that to myself.