Sometimes I think that if I don’t do something creative, I might die. It’s dramatic but it’s true. Or at least it feels that way. As desperate as a toothache–ignorable for only so long until eating is troublesome and sleep is difficult and the throbbing takes over one’s conscious.
Have you ever seen a beehive, the kind with glass sides that lets you look in on hundreds of shimmying bodies milling about, each one pressing against another until they become one vibrating mass?
That’s like my creativity. It hums along softly like a single bee that doesn’t notice the constraints of its surroundings. And then the single bee’s moving and humming pairs with the other bees’ until it reaches a fever pitch of activity, desperate to burst out of its barricade.
That mass of bees, that throbbing toothache is why I’m quitting grad school. No, not quitting per se. Just hitting the pause button. Because as it turns out when your time is occupied with calculus equations and group assignments, you don’t have the energy to pick up a paintbrush, much less the brushes you used months ago, wrapped in Saran Wrap, and threw in the back of your fridge to be dealt with at a later date.
As it turns out, when you find yourself looking at your classmates and imagining how their home countries look and smell and thinking about what their families are like and developing plot lines in your head, you end up missing a lot of the lesson at hand.
And as it turns out, when you marvel at the designs your pen makes while taking notes, and look around at the interior design of the room, and analyze the way a word sounds in a sentence (and there are many, many words in grad school), you find that Econ doesn’t hold the same mystery to you as art and language and storytelling.
And as it turns out, you like Econ, you really do! It thrills you to no end to hear people say, genuinely and without a hint of irony, things like R&D and production optimization, and the market conditions are favorable for…
It excites you to make connections, to hear on the news about a public offering or corporate merger and to actually know in detail what the announcer means. The market conditions are favorable!
But the trouble lies, as it turns out, with those pesky bees. Those bees that exist on earth to do one thing (okay a few things, but it’s a very specialized labor market, an economist might say).
And those bees don’t know that you’ve shut down production, that you’ve temporary delayed all research and development. They just keep humming and buzzing and pushing against the glass until it seems to onlookers an impossibility that they can keep on living and breathing in such an enclosed space.
So I’m taking time off. To do those things that make my heart sing. Like painting and writing and creating. It’s long been a dream of mine to earn an MBA. But it’s also a dream of mine to write a book and dance with my kids to music coming from the record player near our kitchen.
I don’t believe there are right and wrong choices (we really only have to pay taxes and die, after all, and one of those is moderately optional). But I do believe in quieting enough to listen to the buzzing of one’s heart. To acknowledge the wild desires that lay within, and to go boldly in the direction of freedom.