This is the first 'proper' design project I have been assigned to, a milestone to me. Since I started medical school, I have been occupied with studying and studying only, my hobbies put to the side and ignored. Studying medicine, Japanese, and medicine in Japanese, in a university in Japan that teaches everything twice the speed, surrounded by brilliant fellow scholarship students from Southeast Asia, who were the top of their respective alma maters, everyday is a battle. Every second is a mountain. Every minute an ocean to cross.
Sometimes, when I can't go any further any more, and my feet starts to betrayl me, my mind bogging down as the night sags on, everything murking up my way, I would drop my pen, shut my PC, and wander ... like a skeleton in the dark of night. The night is dark but I feel that my soul is even darker, for it holds a cemetary of all my lost, lace-bound dreams.
Everyone is encouraged to be the master of their souls. Sometimes, its just relieving to untie yourself free from the leash that enslaves you, be a little lost soul, just for an hour's freetime. The moment I reclaimed my freedom, so many emotions came rushing inside me. I was 'seeing' things, feeling things, smelling things and enjoying things for the first time after so long, maybe for the first time ever. I was keenly aware of the contours of back-lit trees by the streetlamp, the shadows, the sharp edges, the soft glow of the moon that seemed to just melt into the cloudless sky...and I almost cried, because it's like greeting your old self that disappeared and now reappeared after many years' time.
From then on, I promised to myself that I will stop supressing my creative desires, there is no shame in being a person who is crazy about art as much as he is about medicine. There is no shame in excusing yourself amid your work because creative urges just need to come out. It's all physiology, it's all anatomy, after all, this is me.
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