By Rocco Ruan

As I write this, I’m sitting in my parents’ house on a rainy mid-afternoon. I’m back home for the winter holidays after my first semester of grad school. I’m a Master’s student in computer science at a university across the country. Before I moved there, I did my undergrad in engineering close to home.

In these cool, trendy STEM fields, creativity is important, but only a specific kind of creativity. See, you have to be correctly creative. Have a cool idea for how to approach a math problem? Well, it ain’t worth shit if you can’t balance the equation at the end. Cool research idea? That’s amazing, but how are you going to pitch it to funding agencies?

I like to call myself a “lifelong hobbyist athlete”. I’ve been into rock climbing, Ultimate, badminton, backpacking, et cetera. I never had any significant success in any of these, but I was decent at them, and they were fun – and I really need some kind of exercise to stay sane. Out of fascination for martial arts, and to satisfy my craving to be okay at everything, I joined a judo/sambo club on campus this semester.

Being in a job that relies on being “correct” all the time, I naturally went in a bit wary of head injury. Turns out my worry wasn’t unfounded. After a particularly nasty throw, I started experiencing some trouble falling asleep – I was initially concerned, but got sick with COVID shortly after, so I brushed it off as a weird symptom. Three weeks later, I was back in judo class, and after landing weirdly again from the same throw, by the same dude that threw me the first time, I was diagnosed with a concussion.

Fortunately, my injury was quite mild – but it still resulted in fatigue and difficulty concentrating. Now, it’s been about a month, and I’m much improved, but still feeling slightly off sometimes. The bigger struggle has been deciding what to do about my newfound judo hobby. It’s pretty irrational – considering my concerns, I have every reason to quit and go back to rock climbing, or Ultimate, or any of the other hobbies I’ve had that haven’t injured my brain. From the outside looking in, that would probably be the correct decision.

But some part of me just wants to be a little incorrect. Not too incorrect, mind you – I don’t want to be concussed again. But – perhaps arrogantly – I’d like to get a little creative about how I live my life. Like many other twenty-somethings, I’d like to think that I have a hold of a couple fibres on the thread to happiness, and that if I just do what I feel like is right for me, I’ll succeed in my own way. Whether I’ll eventually give up and fall into some level of apathy remains to be seen – but to all my hypothetical haters out there, you guys can pound sand – or something to that effect. (I really am a twenty-something, aren’t I.)

Anyways, in my pursuit to find “incorrectly creative” (or perhaps creatively incorrect?) ways to live my life, one thing I really would like to explore is – perhaps unsurprisingly – some sort of creative pursuit. Unlike athletics though, I don’t have a “lifelong hobbyist” background in doing that – I never really got hooked on art, or music, or video production, or anything like that, even though I like the idea of all of them, and I’ve kind of tried my hand at all of them. Being kind of a loudmouth in my own awkward way, though, I have gotten pretty good at talking – and in turn, writing.

So, that’s why I’m writing this little post today. I actually wrote a similar post years back relating to the meaning of life and all that, but I never posted it – and looking back, it was far, far too emo to see the light of day. (Maybe one day.) With any luck, I’ll keep writing, and maybe that will bear fruit into something in the future – even if it’s just self-knowledge.

Now, I’m feeling kind of like a nap. I probably won’t take one, though – this whole concussion thing doesn’t seem to be very kind to sleep schedule disruptions.