Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash
Happy new year and it’s March! I realised that I have a lot of things to write, but I end up not writing them.
That’s because:
- I like to process my thoughts first before writing. I did try to write as free like dayre (that is closing down soon) but I like to edit my thoughts time to time.
- Writing takes time. While I still make grammatical errors, but I like my posts to have a direction.
- No audience. I do miss a bit of interaction from having blogs and now having this is for me to ‘syiok sendiri.’ But at the same time, I don’t really want an audience too. What an oxymoron.
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Anyway back to this post. Going through my masters in these few years is a personal journey of discovery. I felt that I have reached some quarter life crisis, and jumping into masters is my way out.
It’s really tough because your friends are not doing it. Resigning from my full time job means no regular source of income. It also means that I am losing touch with my friends and colleagues because I am not working and getting behind the industry. While I can share of the positive things about my postgraduate, but I also want to share my struggles.
You can say that my leap of faith to do masters is like how some people resigned from their job to travel the world. I am sure you can search up articles about people like that and they went to see the world. Sometimes we wonder, “Wow, maybe he/she has saved up a lot or so brave to do that.”
I have an ex-colleague who resigned from her job to meditate in the temple. At first we thought she was going to be a nun, but she did not. She only took that course to understand herself and the religion better, and she is going back to find a job once she is ready.
You can say that my masters is my risky thing that I am ‘travelling visually’ through my masters. While it is not the literal sense of travelling, where I have to uproot myself to another country, but nevertheless the risk of not having a stable income is always there. I won’t go into the arguments of how I have it easy. All I can say is, I have taken risks and I hope that in the long run this masters is going to open more doors for me, even if my closest friends don’t understand it.
If you ask me, what will I do after my masters. To be honest, I don’t know and I know eventually I have to make that decision. But what I have learnt in these two years is the understanding of art and its context. I have learnt history, psychology, postcolonialism, socialism and spirituality through art. I have learnt to see how all these affects the works that we do in our lives, especially art.
And that’s why I don’t talk much about my studies, because it is complex and we all want to believe our biases. As humans, we either have faith or distrust in humanity. For me, it’s the eureka moments of knowing humanity better. Things that I find it hard to understand in real life but made easier through works of art.
The other thing that I have that I have learnt in this journey is that I definitely hated coding. I used to learn a bit because as a web designer, having a bit of code knowledge such as HTML and CSS helps but I struggled with code. It doesn’t help that people think that because I know enough to execute basic designs, I am expected to be a programmer. Many times I failed in programming and people say that I am not trying hard enough.
Yes, going to the dark side and you will stay there if you don’t make the decision to change.
After doing my masters, I love that I could do visual analysis and doing comparisons. While I struggled with all the crazy theories (psychoanalysis anyone?), but it’s really a thing that I can push myself to work even if it takes tears and time to get to where I get at. Also, after I have done my personality tests, I realised why I never liked coding. It is too logical and structured for me to handle. I like to have meanings in my life and I realised meanings in life fuels me.
This is my journey. It’s my path of self-discovery.