A Year of Quietness

It has been quite a while since I wrote my last blog. I drafted a few in the meantime but none of them felt mature enough to publish. I needed the time to quiet down and listen to the voices inside. On this day, while I am recovering from two colds in a row and unable to step outside the apartment for two weeks, I feel like I have calmed down enough to write something to review my past year of life.

If there is a theme to my past year, it is quietness. It allowed me to reflect on what and who matters in my limited lifetime instead of just riding along with the waves of life.

I quitted social media one year and three months ago. Instead of maintaining social networks by liking everyone’s breakfast posts or broadcasting the highlights of my life to the vacuum of the World Wide Web, I occasionally write heartfelt texts (or as I prefer to put it, “letters”) to close friends and visit them in person when the situation allows, while enjoying my life as a recluse.

I stopped comparing myself with others, seeing my peers as potential competitors, or measuring myself against successful people I look up to. I realized it’s distracting to calculate life like a zero-sum game. I could’ve used all that look-around time to simply focus on my own growth. The world is way too big for me to compare myself with everybody else. Even if I am the slowest learner in the whole world, that’s fine. I’d still be doing my thing.

I am learning to become less affected by other people’s words and become a less affective person in general. People around you will, sometimes unintentionally, say discouraging or confusing things. When I notice I am affected by their words, I ask myself: Will I actually change the things I do or the way I do things just because of what they said? If I won’t, then why let it bother me? Very interesting example: I went to a “How To Train Your Dragon” screening followed by a panel where director Chris Sanders gave a piece of advice to students: Don’t follow your dream. Follow your talent. I remember I was so confused after hearing that and was bothered by it for the whole night because I couldn’t tell my dreams from talents. I am just a hardworking person who does everything well as long as I put my heart into it. Is fine art my dream, and technical art my talent, or the other way around? At the end of my panic, I realized: It’s not that I will change the career path that I already set my heart and foot on just because of this one quote, anyway. So I went to bed.

Around Christmas last year, I took a leap of faith and did a big career transition from fine art to technical art. There was a lot of noise in my head when I first started learning new skills: building my first 3D character, writing my first program (c’mon, I swore I wouldn’t write a single line of code till the day I die when I was a fine art student!), picking up math again after all these years… all without formal education – just me and some online materials and library books. Am I goofing around and being ridiculous? Will I make it? Am I distracting myself from my “failed” attempt at becoming a fine artist? … I realized, again, I needed quietness. I told myself that it was not about the outcome of success or failure. It was all about focusing on the present moment and doing the work I was passionate about. I just gotta try as hard as I could and not wonder about anything else.

I kept thinking about the Ghibli film Whisper of the Heart (1995). The film doesn't tell us whether the main characters succeeded in their creative endeavors or not. What matters is that they’re trying their best, and they will keep trying after the story ends. So poetic. Therefore, I will end my story in a similar way. I am not going to say “Look at me now, a year later, I have built a pretty darn nice portfolio and have fully transitioned into a tech artist blah blah blah.” I am still rigging, modeling, and scripting, and I enjoy my day-to-day work more than ever. This matters more than anything else.

Happy new year ;)