(III.) Failure
‘Force of Nature’ is a four-part series;’ the third piece is called Failure.
“Does going home mean I failed?”
For about 3 years, this question has been hanging over my head: If I have to go back home to Thailand: does that mean I’ve failed as an artist?
The first time the question really cemented itself in my psyche was post-grad. I was fresh out of university, somehow both overqualified and underqualified at the same time, unable to find a full-time job in the post-COVID job market.
I find myself faced with this fear again. Fear that I’m not going to be able to keep my stay in the US – going home. I think, at its base, the fear isn’t actually about going home. Thailand is a lovely place to live, and life there is easygoing. What I fear most, I think, is losing my job as an artist. If I go home to Thailand, there isn’t an ecosystem to support the arts to sustain being a full-time artist at least not in the way that I am doing it now.
A failure needs to have a goal. I can’t just out of the blue, fail; I need to fail at something. I think for me, it’s the “being an artist” thing. During a particularly deep self-dissection session, I realized I could live as an artist in Thailand if I wanted to. It just won’t be easy, or the same, or what I have going on now. There are plenty of people in Thailand who are making a living as creatives. And I have it easier than the rest of them because of the experiences and the following I have developed in America. I started to look at the problem from different angles. It felt like realizing that there are more facets to the object you’re holding than when you were looking at it face-on – a square revealing itself to be a cube, a triangle, a prism. And for the first time, I had hope. If I had to go home, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe I could still make it work.
For about 3 years, this question has been hanging over my head: If I have to go back home to Thailand: does that mean I’ve failed as an artist?
The first time the question really cemented itself in my psyche was post-grad. I was fresh out of university, somehow both overqualified and underqualified at the same time, unable to find a full-time job in the post-COVID job market.
I find myself faced with this fear again. Fear that I’m not going to be able to keep my stay in the US – going home. I think, at its base, the fear isn’t actually about going home. Thailand is a lovely place to live, and life there is easygoing. What I fear most, I think, is losing my job as an artist. If I go home to Thailand, there isn’t an ecosystem to support the arts to sustain being a full-time artist at least not in the way that I am doing it now.
A failure needs to have a goal. I can’t just out of the blue, fail; I need to fail at something. I think for me, it’s the “being an artist” thing. During a particularly deep self-dissection session, I realized I could live as an artist in Thailand if I wanted to. It just won’t be easy, or the same, or what I have going on now. There are plenty of people in Thailand who are making a living as creatives. And I have it easier than the rest of them because of the experiences and the following I have developed in America. I started to look at the problem from different angles. It felt like realizing that there are more facets to the object you’re holding than when you were looking at it face-on – a square revealing itself to be a cube, a triangle, a prism. And for the first time, I had hope. If I had to go home, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe I could still make it work.
