The Calamity of Practicality
How unfortunate I must be to live in a place where true passions are stickered as hobbies.
It is a great misfortune to grow up hearing generations upon generations of people whisper in your ear how you should grow up to be in the field of medicine, law, engineering, or accountancy. If you do not fit into any of those categories, you are a disgrace. A stain on a great family name and reputation. A failure.
Living in a third-world country means that you should prioritize having a stable source of income in order to rise above your ranks and have better chances of living the life not only you, but also your family, wish you had from the beginning. No matter how wretched and sick it is to choose practicality over passion, and to continuously be the dog of your family, we can’t always get what we want.
Privilege is what we lack. It is that scrumptious cream-filled pastry we see passing by the local bakery, but we are not fortunate enough to have enough change to attain it, to even get a taste of it.
Now that I have flung myself into god-knows-what, I ache for the comfort of actually being successful in what I am passionate about. I ache for the little praises on my essays and papers given by my teachers dating back to elementary, and for the amazed looks my peers give my paintings or little random drawings snuck between the pages of my high school notebooks. They have wanted to see more of my creativity, more of my prowess. My heart cries painfully for that child who only wished to read, write, and make art in the farthest corner of a room, making her worlds once only real in her imagination, true and alive in this cold, bleak world. She only wished to express herself in a place where creativity is greatly suppressed. She only wished to be herself.
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It is a poor reality how her wings have been clipped, and her smile is no longer.
She is now a slave to practicality. To bear the responsibility of fulfilling the dreams of many before her. If they wanted someone in their line to become something, she will strive to make it come true, no matter how many moons she has cried wishing for a route out of the nightmare she lives in.
She is forever locked in a trance nothing can antidote.
I do not feel the same joy now. I am neither filled with the warmth of bubbling suns inside me nor the cold of hard, sharp daggers piercing through my chest when I do the things I currently do. It is as if all the weight of choosing practicality over passion made me unfeeling.
I have become a lost sailor at sea. One without a map to the mainland, or even a crumb of bread to sustain me.
Choosing practicality killed the once-happy child inside me, and it will continue to kill no matter how many attempts have been made to resurrect it.
Here lies the child who only wished to paint fantasies and narrate her stories. May she one day find that smile again, if she ever escapes this goddamn nightmare.
