First Muse

I may never make it big, but after a long day of work, I should be content to sit down, have a pleasant cup of coffee, and take my day into perspective. Science may be my new life now, but there is a world outside of it too. Stepping into the hard streets of the city, watching the window displays, waiting for the traffic lights to turn green, I remind myself that there is a life outside of the university. It seems so far to me now, but I’ll have to live with it one day, call it my home, and hope that it will take me in. Fear of the world wraps around me like a blanket. Even within these walls I fear I’m not content. I go to class, do my work, and hand in my papers dearly hoping to have it come back to me with an A. I know what I’m doing, but it’s just that I fear becoming a number -- that’s what it is. That’s the danger of becoming a science major. Coming from where I’m coming from, I fear that I’ve lost my voice. I have no time to read literature or write. I must accept now that I’m no longer an English major. This is the path I’ve chosen, it is what I want, and I must write only when my work allows. Writing used to be my work, but it is no longer my career. Biology is. Science will buy me a nice home and put food on the table. For that I can live with myself. I can write when I finally feel secure, and that time will come eventually, just not today. Sometimes I miss the romance of being an artist -- living on a whim, observing the small details -- thinking that I was better than other people, that I saw more than them, and that somehow this gave me more of a right to live than they do. There’s more to being a poet than that of course. I know that kind of thinking is flawed and the kind of thinking a writer would have in high school -- but I encountered it first entering this field, and now that I’m leaving it, I acknowledge it for what it is. I am convinced that poets do live intensely, and yes, I want that for myself as well. I always have. I just can’t embrace it wholly. I have to compromise. I have a need to feel useful and to make money. As much as I like poetry, there are times when I feel it is unread, and I would be under-appreciated. I think that my time would be better spent doing something else, and so I turn to researching drugs and trying to help people. Poetry helps people as well, but it’s hard to convince myself of that when I am down, and I just can’t get over the fear of never making it at all. I think I am doing what is best for now. I am putting my other interests on hold, but with the promise to pick it up again one day. I like it too much to give it up. It’s a part of me, and it comes out when it needs to. When I lose my voice is when I lose my soul, and that is when I become another number-crunching, data-generating machine. I don’t want that. I’ll never become that. I like the “humanism” of work too much for that, and I think that work should bring people together more so than it alienates them. I like writing. I like doing this at the end of the day. It helps me reclaim that part of me that is unique, something no one else can claim, and then I am no longer a name on a list competing for a grade, but a person. I’m not just merely the sum of my clothes, my grades, or my networth, but a person with ideas, aspirations, and fears. I am myself -- but who, if not for my writing, would ever know that?