Painting Myself
Painting Myself
  • reporter Kim Min-gyu
  • 승인 2020.07.14 18:28
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We come across many YouTube channels now that our generation seems to be about investing our huge chunk of life into YouTube. Unexceptionally, I also spend quite a bit of my time just binge-watching a lot of YouTube videos. There is a Q&A content where YouTubers answer viewers’ questions about their YouTube channels or themselves.
Even though I have watched a lot of Q&A videos, the most recent Q&A video I watched made me feel somewhat different. I envied this YouTuber for having such explicit answers for all given questions. I imagined myself getting thrown tonnes of questions about my ambitions, goals, fears, or my statement about sensitive issues. Would I be able to answer what I truly believe? Would I even have answers? I felt like a colorless person. An empty person with no preferences, no statements, and no character. 
Taking time to think about myself, feeling depressed, I came to realize that my feelings and thoughts were quite rushed. It was nonsense for a person to have no favorites or remain undecided to every single dilemma. For me, I like calm and peaceful feelings of a lazy Sunday morning with sunlight piercing through my window. I like lying on the water and feeling water waves gently hit the side of my face. I enjoy the thrill of speed when I go skiing. I relish time debating with friends about various philosophical questions that have nothing to do with our lives. I believe in social inequality and climate crisis though I am doing nothing about them. I currently have no sensitive issues that I have a strong opinion about. My weird hobby is to make a list of words that I like. It is usually consisted of words I think are dramatic, such as “denounce” and “betrayer”.
Sorting things out, I grasped the idea that discovering who we are is not about excavating parts of ourselves like an artifact but rather investing time and creating ourselves or, as I would like to express, “painting” ourselves. We cannot possibly have strong feelings, preference, and beliefs for something out of nowhere. We need experiences to ‘make’ who we are. We search for colors, learn about them, and decide whether to paint them to ourselves. Surely, I know I like skiing, because I have skied. I believe social inequality, because I have experienced some of it myself and heard of some as well. I am not doing anything, because I lack experience and knowledge about the issues to be strongly motivated about them.
I assume no one is colorless, but there could be a difference in how strong the colors are. I believe pale characters happen because of lack of experience or absence of thinking over an experience. We like to stay in our comfort zone. Some of us just let the experience and feelings fade away after a valuable unexpected moment. I spent my high school days dull. It was a never-ending cycle of dorm, class and self-study room. We all had boring school lives under our education system. I think it is easy to have a pale characteristic and to struggle figuring out ourselves. At least I still have so much of myself to figure out.
In college, we proceed with our careers. But I believe the much bigger role of university days is to “paint” who we truly are. It is especially precious for people who did not have enough time and opportunities to grasp an idea about ourselves in our childhoods. So Postechians, step out and tackle things. Encounter and feel. Cheers to all the colorful colors we are about to paint ourselves with.