On greatness…

Sometimes people tell me how much they love my writing. How touching and powerful it can be. Sometimes I believe them. Other times I read what other people have written, like just about everything at Halley’s Comment, and I am reminded that there are other people out there who deserve so much more than I to be writing at all. That my own writing, while better than some, is not nearly as good as others.

This is a disheartening thing for me, about me. I have potential to be good at just about anything I choose, but there isn’t really anything I am great at. I do not even feel that there is the potential for me to be great at even one thing. Good, sure. Even really, really good, if I dedicate myself to it and focus on becoming the best that I can be, but not great. I can’t cross that line from Advanced to Master, and certainly not what only one or two Masters in a generation can: to Wizard. They say to become a Master level violinist, you must already be great before the age of 12, or the brain literally doesn’t grow right to allow it. What other opportunities for greatness have I passed up by not specializing early enough? All of them, I suspect.

This doesn’t mean that I give up. This doesn’t mean that I start erasing things from my whiteboard. I still want to write, to paint, to film, to code, and on and on… I’m just a little disheartened that I will never be the best writer, or a great painter, or an astounding film-maker, or code some groundbreaking software, and do anything else at that above and beyond level, no matter how hard I try. Most of the people who are respected as the best and the greatest in their fields say that they knew since they were children exactly what they were going to be doing with their lives. M. Night Shyamalan was making movies as a child; you can see part of one of them on his 6th Sense DVD. What was I doing as a child, what did I want to be when I grew up?

I remember some of the lies about that, made to satisfy people who insisted that I must want to be something. Physics was a major I selected because I wasn’t allowed to go to college without selecting a major. My friends and family simply wouldn’t allow me to get away with it. When I was in High School and took every computer class they offered, I found that the sort of programming they were trying to teach me was to write business applications and the sort of programming I wanted to do was either AI or Art, and I lost interest. Elementary school, I think, was mostly about surviving. Not so much thought about what I might be doing later, as much as just trying to get to later in one piece. Or maybe…

Maybe it was writing the whole time. I sortof remember writing my first sci-fi mini-book in the third grade. I know I was writing plenty of poetry and short stories in HS and for a couple of years after that, because I remember sharing them with people. I remember when I tried to figure out what to major in I was already dis-illusioned about the possibility of making a living writing, so didn’t even consider it (that, and there really isn’t a major for people who want to learn how to write fiction professionally). I look at my websites and I see that it is really an outlet for writing, and basically exists so I have a constant push to be writing something. Or maybe…

Maybe it was always painting. Since before I can remember, my mother has encouraged creativity and offered projects that basicly came down to painting bisque most of the time. I still have a wonderful ceramic cat I painted I-don’t-know-how-long-ago (some people don’t understand the pure white eyes; it isn’t supposed to be a knick-knack, it’s supposed to be art). When I was home-schooled in the 8th grade and I asked for paints and canvases and an easel, they were provided, and I tried to do that, but was discouraged that I couldn’t even follow along with Bob Ross’ happy little trees, or really just represent anything that existed outside of my imagination. I stopped painting for a few years until I was in college when I did a few murals. After I got kicked out of college I was still interested in painting, but couldn’t paint on the walls of the places I was living because I was just renting and started again with the canvases. In all the time I’ve been painting, I’ve never done more than one or two things in a burst, and then only once every few months. I’m looking forward to being forced to paint in upcoming years for the fine arts program at ASU. Or maybe I was right the first time, and it’s writing. Or maybe I was right before that when I said I would never be great at anything. Or maybe…

Maybe it’s cooking…