Demi Encounter #1: The Prelude
Last February, I sat down at my piano and wrote a song. At the time, this song was meant only for me. Its sole purpose was to help me heal and overcome. Ironically, though, from this personal endeavor sprang an idea for a project that, I hope, will embrace and celebrate the Encounters that we have with the characters that exist beyond the walls of our personal lives.
My song is entitled Waiting and being that it feels like I have been waiting forever to launch this project, I think it is a fitting title for the first Encounter that I will share. If you like reading, I invite you to read the narrative that follows, but if not, I hope you enjoy our first official Encounter! Hopefully this will be the start of many more to come from myself and all of you! :)
Have you ever felt like you’ve been forced into a mold where not all of you fits?
Regardless of whether you are a proud self-proclaimed outsider or someone who doesn’t like to go against the grain, I wonder to what extent we all become compartmentalized by Society; being bounded and defined primarily by our occupation, education, ethnicity, and appearance.
In our day to day, we are often referred to by our job: we are the engineer, the teacher, the nurse, the construction worker, the actress, and in the eyes of Society, it seems that defines 90% of what we know about you and who we think you are.
This concept of Society’s mold never sat well with me and for the longest time I struggled with the decision of which mold I would choose to fall into and which character in Society I would choose to play: The Artist or The Engineer?
When I was 18 and starting down my path to a professional career, this question stared me down like a forked road – the arts and engineering were opposing directions and I could only choose one. Little did I know at the time that my future Encounters with the different characters of life would reveal that this was never actually a choice to be made, that the dichotomy that exists within all of us can harmoniously co-exist as long as we are willing to redefine the mold that confines who we really are.
And so with this prelude, I now set the stage for Encounters.