I think I’m becoming a hermit slowly but surely. I don’t want that to happen, but it would make amazing filler for my autobiography, so I might just commit myself to learning to make a mean Ramen and train my bladder to allow myself to stay in my room for days without leaving. Of course I jest, or at least I want you to think I do.
The more and more I think about life as it is currently for me, the more I see how little I really know about what it is I hope to achieve in life. As a Freshman in college, a professor asked my 2D Design Class what we hoped to achieve with our craft. Some people said fame, others said professional level skill, but I said that I wanted to change the world through my art. This comes off as terribly self absorbed, but one must realize that I had the best intentions. In many ways my dream remains the same. I want to be the guy who makes you consider an idea as you walk down a busy metropolitan sidewalk. I want to be the guy who makes you smile during an animated movie you’re way too oldto be seeing, because you identify with a character, or think something was funny.
Most of all, I want to be the guy who if nothing else inspires the generation that follows mine to dream so, so big. I’m content to be in the acknowledgement pages of a few novels in exchange for my own personal fame.
I want to get the phrase, “the best is yet to come” tattooed on my forehead in Impact font, so whether I want people to or not, they never forget to smile at my optimism. I mean this in jest, but I want to be that kind of person. One metaphor I find myself returning to over and over again is the one of the butterfly. We go to elementary school and high school and all that jazz. That’s being a caterpillar. After High School, we go to college where we enter a cocoon. Now note that little of the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly happens during pre-college life. While in the social sarcophagus of cocooning, we find out who we are and grow our wings. We develop patterns that will define our appearance forever.
Finally, we graduate college, and get a real job. We get established in a community somewhere, and we eventually pop out of our cocoon and become a butterfly. My biggest question as I travel through this critical stage of development is this: What kind of butterfly do I want to be?