diversity is healthy

i was supposed to not go to the CCP (Cultural Center of the Philippines) visit today for my HIST114 class but i was able to drag myself out of the house despite the many temptations.

i love the CCP. it's the home of the many great Filipino artists no matter what their fields of specialty are: visual art, literary art, or performing art. perhaps this is because i am a frustrated visual artist (i wish i could paint), writer (i wish i could write and win a Palanca award someday), and a performing artist (i wish i had the guts to join an acting workshop). it's a totally different world inside the CCP. it won't fail to amaze you how gifted people can be: the ballerinas, the visual artists, the actors and actresses, the singers, the pianists, the sculptors... i can go on and on.

so far, i've taken up ballet lessons (oh yes, surprised eh?), piano lessons (for 8 years), painting lessons, and a few dancing lessons when i was a child. yes, i was already active when i was a little girl but what i lacked during that time was patience. i wanted to be good at all of these all at once. i had many interests rather than playing all day. but none of these became fruitful. i wasn't interested in ballet during that time (oh, the regret!), i lacked concentration during my piano lessons (i didn't want to play before but now i really do), about the painting lessons? i was a kid. i had a short attention span. dancing lessons, i was too lazy to attend the classes. oh, i was also supposed to be enrolled in voice lessons but they didn't have voice coaches in Myanmar when i lived there.

so yes, the regrets. but just last summer i wanted to enroll in an acting workshop. this will help boost my self-esteem, my public speaking, and it will finally cure my bad case of stage fright. for those who know me in person might be wide-eyed shocked by this revelation but yes, i have stage fright. if it doesn't show, it's probably because i'm sometimes good at hiding it and acting cool on stage. but really, being in front of people just gives me the palpitations and the jitters. my grade school best friend invited me to join PETA (a theatrical group similar to TRUMPETS) and sign up for the workshops because it was going to be fun. but it was summer vacation and i had to take care of some things (like beach hopping! haha!) so i passed. maybe when i'm off school i'll take time to do the things i really want before joining the crazy work force they call the "rat race".

i think it's great that there are a lot of opportunities out there for me. all i need to do is to be bold enough to sum up all the guts i could squeeze out of my system. why? so that i can be what i want to be and quench the thirst for adventure and rediscover myself.

i always believed that in order to succeed you have to focus on the field that you excel in the most. yes, this is true but there's a whole new different side.

i believe that it won't hurt to try out your luck in other fields (other than the one you're good at) because who knows? you might have been ignoring your skills outside the field of your specialty because you were too busy excelling in that one field that you blew your chance of discovering a new talent.