Either Or

As is often the case at the beginning of summer, I have been feeling a bit scattered lately. Summer, for me represents the period of time when the demands of school start to fade and the desire to create art starts to swell. And swell it has. I can't say that's a bad thing. I have some of my most productive moments in early summer. In my attempts to take a break from being a psychologist, I retreat to being an artist, and often times good things happen. Last summer I wrote a book. I worked on a movie. I wrote some music. Not too bad for a summer break. This summer I have been working pretty hard on finishing my photography book. I've also been playing my trumpet again, which is odd. But like I said, early summer does strange things to me.

All this creative activity has brought me back to the age old question that I have asked myself for several years now. Its the question that created this blog. The question is, what would I do if I could choose? When school is over, what will I focus my time and energy on? In every break I get from the world of academics and science, I dive head first into being an artist. But, because it is more of an outlet than an occupation at the moment, I never spend enough time on any project for it to become a financial factor in my life. So when school is over and I have the freedom to do whatever it is that I want to do, what will that thing be?

Sometimes I think I know the answer to that question. Lately I have tended to believe that I was meant to be in the helping profession. My life journey seems to be perfectly suited for helping other people through the struggles that I so clearly needed to go through in order to understand folks the way I do. But then there's this part of me that remembers that nothing makes me feel more alive than being creative. That's when I start to wonder if making plan B into plan A really ever made any sense at all.

Having just finished the first half of my doctoral training, I have come to realize that my current path toward becoming a psychologist is either the greatest accidental discovery of my life or an extremely long and time consuming distraction from my first and only true love.