I've barely started to emerge from myself

I have limited practice writing personal mission statements. I also hate talking about the future. I don't mean talking about the future like this:

"Hey mom, wouldn't it be cool if someday I went abroad to work on a farm in Germany?" 

I mean when someone asks me a question commonly asked of young adults. It goes:

"Where do you see yourself in [x] years?"

I don't know. I don't think I'll have it figured out for a while. I'm entering my third year of college and I'm still not sure majoring in music was a good idea. Once, I received scholarship money for writing an essay about how much I hate that question. 

I find it challenging, as many my age do, to see my future place in the world as anything particularly concrete. I have ideas for myself, I have wants and hopes and dreams, but my plans take significantly longer to solidify. In a similar vein, when I think about what art I want to make, I feel I don't know myself or the world or the field sufficiently enough to make a contribution that I would call purposeful or valuable.

If it's in the Louvre, it's probably a meaningful contribution to society, right?

I'm a selfish young adult. That's why I'm studying art - I want to be happy. Thus far three people at my place of work have told me to major in business, because it's what will make money. It's a "good investment in my future" or something. I think to myself, I am investing in my future.

Have you ever felt the bottomless joy of making someone happy with something you made? Have you ever been asked to play a tune at holiday gatherings, and it's embarrassing to play in front of your whole extended family, and the music is so intuitive by now as to become monochromatic and lifeless, and you feel you simply have nothing to give it because you know The First Noel just too well - but the crinkly smile on your father's face is making you just a little teary, isn't it, you big softie? That's why I'm studying art - I want other people to be happy.

A day LSO and LU choirs made some people very happy, and very sad. Mendelssohn's Elijah.

I'm a selfish young adult. I want to make stuff that's cool to me and me only. I want to draw dinosaurs with big teeth like I loved to when I was four. I want to make gargantuan works of eldritch horrors in eye-searing color palettes. I want to fuel my fascination with the anatomy of hands by making portraits of them, over and over again. I want to make sickeningly self-indulgent art. That's why I'm studying it - I want to be happy. 

Hands, 2021.

But Marshall McLuhan says, "In an electric information environment ... too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other." (McLuhan 24) I cannot simply doodle dragons and call it a day. I also don't want to. It should exhaust me, the merciless digital communication landscape demanding I create Art with a capital "A," art with meaning and a purpose if I am to be called anything resembling serious. Instead, it enlivens me. I yearn to dig my hands into the fertile soil of culture and plant a seed that I may watch grow and thrive in other people. I want to make meaning and joy, provoke thought and a crinkly smile. That's why I'm studying art - I want to make others and myself happy.

I don't know who I am yet really, or how to reflect that and what I make of the world in what I do. So far this has resulted in wild oscillations between attempts at meaning-making and pure self-indulgence. I will know myself better someday. By the end of this term I will probably have come a few steps closer. I hope it's a good journey, this road to happiness. At least I get to draw dinosaurs along the way.