Things at Hopkins are hard to do.
In fact, some days, I may say that there are more things at Hopkins that are hard to do than there are things that are easy to do.
In no particular order, here is a list of things at Hopkins that are hard to do:
- Have a successful course registration
- Find a student who isn’t pre-med; or, find a student who isn’t pre-med and isn’t a double major
- Hear someone utter his full, government name, almost as seldom spoken as Bloody Mary: Ron Daniels
Perhaps the hardest of them all, however, is to find an artist.
I don’t mean just a non-STEM major — certainly not the non-STEM majors giving your quintessential Hopkins students a run for their money (by which I mean the International Studies, Economics, Political Science pre-law triple majors). I mean an artist.
Mind you, an artist can be anyone: artists can be the three-headed hydras described above, or they can be the anything-but-ordinary yet run-of-the-mill here pre-meds. Or they can be pre-nothing majors of any flavor.
You’ll notice the title of the article is Finding Your Inner Artist.Therein lies my thesis, buried (like this lede): Hopkins does not lack artists, but they are hard to find — even within themselves.
Everyone has the capability of being an artist, or is born one, but it takes courage and conscious rejection to flourish as one. You’ll notice the subtitle of this article is Disappointing Your Parents, (aside: not my parents, who I know are reading). And therein lies the reason it’s hard to find the artist within yourself: hyperproductive, relentlessly money-mongering societies like ours devalue art, happiness and individuality. The existence of the artist is stigmatized.
With the beginning of a new (school) year comes a hopeful feeling. Artists love new beginnings, so take this opportunity and use it to catalyze your inner artist. This article will outline some small practices that, through the personal experience of this so-called artist, are (anecdotally) proven to work.
Journaling
I began to think that some of my group chats tired of reading my crash-outs on the daily. I said to myself, “This is why people journal, to give their friends a break.” Now, I think that may not be the case, but I’m glad it was what it took to get me journaling.
Buy a Moleskin, or steal a legal pad; buy a fancy fountain pen, or steal your friend’s Pilot G2. Write your thoughts and observations on the backs of CharMar napkins. Journaling is less a practice in how to write about your day as it is in how to experience your day.
The first time you sit down to journal, you may find yourself thinking: What did I do today? It will feel like you did nothing. You may write what you ate for dinner (you may have already forgotten what you ate for breakfast), and then you may wonder how people find journaling therapeutic at all.
With consistency, though, you’ll eventually find yourself going through your day and noticing things you’ve never noticed before, then thinking, I need to write that in my journal. Suddenly, your neural pathways that were before overgrown with neglect have begun to clear, and you’ve become attuned to a new life.
All of this, it goes without saying, is necessary in seeing what an artist sees.
Delete TikTok, Instagram, etc. — download Pinterest, Spotify
Perhaps this one sounds sanctimonious. I don’t mean it to be. In fact, I used to love TikTok, but only for the specially curated videos which, even then, somehow only sometimes found their ways to me. I liked the aesthetic video montages of maximalist rooms in a nice, old house with golden-hour lighting and popular instrumental music in the back — do you know the ones? Oh, and the poetry slideshows, too.
Then, I realized that Pinterest had everything I wanted from TikTok at a much higher success rate and with fewer dance trends in between — even if I have to endure the occasional disturbing Pampers ad. But the silence of Pinterest put me off at first. So, I turned to Spotify, where I could simultaneously play my own music picks while scrolling my own aesthetic picks. I reinvented TikTok, but better.
Newcomers to Pinterest will quickly find how startlingly responsive its algorithm is. In terms of how well it knows you with little input, Pinterest is like an old-lady psychic.
Now, I have boards of poetry with more than 400 pins, and a board of rooms and houses I hope to have myself in the future. Like journaling, my Pinterest/Spotify dream duo has helped me curate my sense of self and identity as both a person and artist — with the added benefit of being easier to pry myself from than TikTok.
Be slow
I must admit: I stole this from a former professor, a trained philologist. What the philology community — those word-lovers, them — have known for who-knows-how-long now, I’m coming too frustratingly late: Be slow.
Through the lens of college particularly, consider the fact that these are four years of your life — though some may try to hit fast-forward, robbing themselves of one of those years — where you get to focus on honing your mind and yours alone. When else in your life will be able to be so socially acceptably selfish, beholden to no one else?
Most of the time, we students try to change learning: mutilating texts and truths that have been sharpened through centuries to fit in the 8.5-by-11 of our spiral-bound notebooks that we’ll recycle at the year’s end, or worse, into pithy AI prompts. What we should be doing is allowing learning to change us.
It’s not a secret how much it costs for so many students to attend Hopkins, or any college for that matter. Why, then, should anyone want to graduate as merely a formality of some pay-to-play career? As if happy about the fact, some students say, “When you get a job, you won’t even use your degree, they just train you on the spot.”
Rather than permission to allow your mind to clock out, it should be a call to action. Especially if you may not use precisely what you learn now in your career later, you should not let it go to waste. Let it change how you interact as a person in this world — with others, with the world and with yourself.
