We have had this idea that it is my wife’s “turn” to pursue something past her useless bachelor’s degree, to go in whatever direction she wants with it. She put me through eight years, she deserves the same in return. Having kids now makes it more difficult, but we have maintained optimism that it could be done.
She doesn’t need to guarantee herself a career of full time work, though she’d be fine with that as well. She’s really in a great position to “follow her dream,” whatever that might be.
So even though photography is far from a growth industry, and people who can shop up a bit o’ graphic design for their friends live on every street corner, she had decided nevertheless to pursue such arts, because it really is the kind of thing she truly loves to do. We figured this is a flexible option. Getting serious training in these kinds of things could lead to… self employment, or jobs in the ad industry, or some happy change of major as she explores options while in school, and so on. We figured things could turn out happy however things turn out.
Well, this was all predicated on an assumption that with training, she could go from “I have a good eye” to “I can create superlatively arresting images and arrange them in compelling ways. Anyway, arresting and compelling enough to earn some dough.”
Tonight she revealed something to me which, to put it delicately, she has kind of kept secret. Not that she was intentionally holding back information, I think, but she was, I think, embarrassed.
I have to explain something first though. (Sorry. Writing on the fly.) A few years ago, she took a photography class. She gained hard-earned high praise in a frank letter written by her teacher after a semester spent with her (my wife) thinking he didn’t think much of her. It turned out he considered her to be one of the best students he’d seen in a long time. He didn’t single her out for praise in class, and so she (being, like me, a feedback junkie spoiled by too much uncritical praise in our grade school years) had thought she wasn’t doing well. Turned out he thought very highly of her. She and I both took this as a sign that it would not be a complete waste of time for her to pursue visual art and design, despite also knowing it’s a competitive field. As I said, we believed it possible to pursue this in a flexible way, allowing for many possible outcomes, all of which seemed fairly happy to us.
Anyway, what she admitted tonight was this. I forgot to mention, by the way, that she probably has dyscalculia. What this means, basically, is that she cannot hold numbers and formulas in her head. Okay, so now, what she told me tonight, which she had never told me before, was this: She’d done well in that class, but only by constantly using a crib sheet to function as her memory for all the stuff about “f-stops” etc etc. (I don’t remember any of the other terminology but photographers reading this will understand.) Try as she might, she never could remember any of this stuff. She just had to write it down in a carefully organized way and use that. Okay, no problem, so she has to write it down. She didn’t know this to be fatal. But it did make her nervous.
And now, for the past couple of months, she’s been reading up on photography stuff, has even enrolled in a class, and she is coming to realize: To be any actual good at this, there is no way she’ll be able to wing it and fake it with written notes. She needs to know all these numbers and procedures, and she needs to know them by heart, with immediate recall. And she, knowing herself, and having thought about this now for a long time, has realized this is not going to happen for her. She’ll get to a point a year or two in at which she will no longer be able to “cheat” her way through (for lack of a better term–it’s not really cheating of course) and she will fail. And she does not see this, understandably, as a good course of action.
Similarly, with other aspects of graphic design, having looked around at what other complete amateurs are doing for free for their friends on the web, and taken a serious inventory of her own skills, she has concluded that there’s nothing there that she has any good reason to think it’d make sense going to school for. Her exact reasons for this were not clearly expressed, but she said something about how she is not creative like she thought she was, that she “had thought she would be able to come up with something, but couldn’t”–which would seem to indicate she underwent some concrete challenge and failed to even get through the starting gate. I am not sure what happened here but it was not a conversation in which interrogation would have been appropriate.
So.
The end of it is this: She’s giving up on her dream. She will not pursue it. She has determined that it would be foolish to do so. And she has nothing to replace it. And I don’t know what to do. And neither do you. But there is literally not one person in the world that I can discuss this with (other than her, and not right now) and I feel compelled to write about it, just to think it through, just to get a handle on what’s happening.
This is defeat.
