Just came back from Kuala Lumpur, after staying with my brother for a few days, accompany him as he starts his internship as an engineer. For most people, working is no big deal. But neither my brother and I have any working experience. So its consider a big step in life.

During the stay, I managed to meet up with a few uncles who are also engineers, working in the same industry. Also, the fact that the company my brother is working now is the company that my late father co-founded. So, ever since i am young, i always dream of working together and sort of “reconquer” that company. But now, with me studying in Arts, there is no more chance of laying foot there, not to mention working together with my brother.

I always thought that being an artist is a better choice as we are being paid for doing what we like. But the more i find out about this industry, the more i think that artists are not free to do what they like. They are not being paid for doing what they like. If the client request that you change the design, you change it; if they want the story to be different, you got to change to what they want. Plus, the money earned might not be as easy as being an engineer. I always thought that working as a white collar labor means fix and stressful working hours. Everyday sitting in a desk, facing tons of documents, reading, writing and all other boring duties. But it turns out that there are company that respect their workers and work as a team. The company that my brother work in is just like that. (at least from what i heard). They rarely ask their workers to stay overtime, everyone working together and helping each other. All of a sudden, the childhood dream i had of becoming and engineer is back haunting me.

I always thought that i didn’t want to live a repetitive and boring working life and that dream of working as an engineer is because of my father’s and relatives influence. It is not MY dream. The moment that i realize these, i start to think what i want and i realized that i wanted to paint and draw. That leads me to learning art today. But now that i look back, what i am after is sense of achievement. Being able to design, to make and to create something. This feeling can also be found in the engineering industry. In fact, what i realized after this trip is that it might be easier to get through the engineering industry because what you designed and calculated, is materialized in the real world. You are making imagination into reality. Whereas in the art industry, we are making imagination in to virtual reality. Everything is still virtual and not real. A good character design remains as a character in a story. To make it worst, we don’t have the knowledge to make them real. For example, while designing mechs, we can only design but can never materialize them. We can make models of them, but never a fully functional one. Of course, i do know that engineers are not capable of doing that alone too. But at least they posses the fundamental knowledge and understanding that act as a base for them to push it a step further.

So, the worse case scenario now is that I might live a life full of emptiness. Of unrealized dreams and fantasy, living just in a little shell of imagination that is full of cracks. Thus, all these leads to my confusion now. What am I really after? What is the true dream? The one where i making a living working as an engineer, following my brother’s path or as an artist, making a living from my interest. Then it raises another question. What is my interest? Am I really interested in Arts? or am i just interested in it due to the praises i received when i was young? or am i interested in it because it gives me a sense of accomplishment? Where is ME in this world?
All these questions keep haunting me. Its the same when i am deciding which course to take when switching from science stream to art stream. Now the feeling amplified because i am truly standing at the middle of a thin rope high above the air, connecting from a big platform to a summit.