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The journey to knowing what yourself really love is annoying, frustrating and just plain utterly difficult especially to a person less gifted with the Eureka moment in her early years in elementary nor in high school. I just don't know what I want to be - even while I was already in 4th year of high school and the entrance tests of universities were bothering me with the question "what course would you like to take?!"
I hope this activity of briefly thinking about the past up to the future would lead me to a conclusion that what's in my mind right now is really what I want to do as a career/job/profession for the rest of my life. After 20 years of being indecisive, there's got to be something that would lead me to decide after all.
In my childhood, my parents already had ideas of what I would be more than I have. My mother poured all attention with the artistic side as she supplied the materials for drawing, coloring, lettering and even painting! At the young age of four, I was forced to bring out the beauty of a picture with the size of a cartolina by using color pens. I would see the pride and happiness of Mama in the sight of an art, I put my efforts into. One time, I even heard her making plans of me being enrolled in a school of arts. It didn't freak me out at that time. I was enjoying the colors, the drawings, the fancy, the fantasy but in due time, we both realized that I lack the ability to draw without something to copy from. And that sort of disencouraged me.. but maybe not her.
On the other hand, my father had taken me to far-away places, exposed me to poverty and ingrained in my little brain, the essence of scientific and critical thinking. While being a 1st grade student, I was also a student as well as playmate of his co-workers in the NGOs he worked for. This was all in accordance to his grand plan that I also grew up as someone "serving the people". As I look back, I realized these early years were most influential – I learned to love traveling and adventure, I learned to love being with people of different ages and class and I started to think that whatever I may be in the future, I would like to be someone helping other people while earning a living.
What I did with the annual essays in elementary of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” was to write a lie. In order to pass the subject, I had to think of me wanting to be a doctor. Half-heartedly, I wrote that ambition along with the little less reasons why I wanted to be a doctor. In fourth grade, I thought about it seriously since it could have supported our family with financial stability. However, my father hit this first-realized dream with a harsh reality. He said he could not support the education of a medical student. I introduced the idea to him again in my third year in college and was answered with a different argument yet equally disencouraging. In addition to the financial matter, he let me pondered upon the reality of seeing blood and death – which he knew I had fear.
In high school, I felt most comfortable with the English subject. It was where I knew I was doing good. Added to his fact is that, my love for poetry-writing and songs. I loved grammar and I love stories. So in the sudden application to the university, I automatically picked AB English as first choice. Yet, I wasn’t admitted. In the end, I was accepted in my second choice, Social Work and that’s another story.
On a jeepney ride to school, there was an old woman and a pretty fresh graduate having a conversation about the possibility of the young lady being admitted to a job. When the old woman asked her what she finished in college, she said “Social Work”. I didn’t know what it meant by that time but I was certainly intrigued as curiosity sprang in my senses. I wanted to now what the course was for. Out of curiosity, I wrote it as the second choice. Besides, it was impossible for me to pass this university anyway, and so I thought.
It’s not that I favor arts and humanities, I was also equally interested with science. I played with toy pliers, surgical tools, flasks in an imaginary laboratory. At some point in time, I wanted to be a scientist. Yet, the quality of education in the public elementary and high schools of the Philippines hindered this dream. I haven’t even experienced dissected a frog! And experiments in high school was just so boring because it was always “this” experiment. I wanted to be a good scientist yet my environment wouldn’t want me to. And I guess, I’m not the only one hindered by this realty.
The time in college was much more difficult as I had experienced so many things and many opportunities opened up. My love for music and playing the guitar in a band was tickled with a friend who invited me to form a band with a new brand of music – psychedelic, math-core, sweet melody blending with the hard rock sound of rhythmic guitar. We were thinking of new, of another alternative and that excited me. I wanted to focus with music at that point in time yet we all became busy, and the chance to make music gradually blown away.
Photography! It was the fast art of the new age. I had interest in that too as well as in writing. There was a moment in a bus ride when I thought about coffee shops, the lights and how I wanted to describe an object in a situation with melodic striking words and these words would form a literature of wit, humor, drama and excitement – the same way I have experienced upon reading a book. But then, I don’t have that writing capability and I was once not admitted in AB English, talk about losing confidence. So I fed my self with a piece of cake named contentment in writing case studies which I could experience with social work.
The class in General Psychology was what I enjoyed most in my college life. I hadn’t gained interest in learning intently about theories not until I encountered Freud, Bandura, Jung, Adler and the undying question of how one’s personality is developed – nature or nurture? At my sophomore year in college, I wanted to shift to Psychology. Yet my father didn’t permit. He asked me to finish Social Work first then proceed with other fields of knowledge I may want using the money from my own pocket. Disappointing as well as authoritarian, I finished the four years of Social Work with the development of love for it since it also required knowledge in Psychology.
Now that I’m working, I want to be practical and to be of use to humanity and society. I appreciated the approach to helping through community as an entry point rather than the individual or group. Working with communities cuts across ages and sectors as well as requiring one to be able to work in a generalist perspective – direct work with the community people, enhancing organizational mechanisms of helping, and advocacy. At present, I plan to continue enriching experience in working with communities and after two or three years of saving money for higher education, enter Grad school of community development or sociology. The interest in psychology is still bugging me but it remains as a third option for Masteral Studies. I am now growing love for teaching and facilitating learning and I always want to get the precious price of participants/students/listeners ignited to be more critical of problems in reality and take action. I want to be like Morrie and I’d like to be in contentment with this dream.
Maybe I will.. I want to. I want to come back to UP.
But I have to earn the money for this dream first. ^_^
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