The road not taken

If I had it to do over again, knowing what I know now, I think the biggest thing I would change is my career-path, which was diverted in primary school, primarily by my parents.  I was a semi-talented, self-taught artist as a child (all big ideas but no technique).  This was something my mother encouraged me in, as she was a painter and ceramicist herself.  At least until grade seven; Near the end of the year I, along with bout half-a-dozen other of my Westminster peers, were offered the opportunity to attend a different public high school to the one I would normally attend (based on geography), in order to take part in an intensive Art course for promising talents.  Ironically, the alternative school was actually closer to where I lived.

I had some reservations - I knew a few of the other kids that had been offered the course, and I knew a couple of them were way better artists than me.  I wasn't sure if I would make the grade.  But the ultimate decision was my parents'.  Each for their own reasons, they decided that it would be a mistake for me to take up the offer; Dad because it wouldn't lead to a real job (essentially the same reason I had to drop out after year ten), and Mum, because she thought it would expose me to drugs and the wrong sort of people (those, I guess, who had no chance of getting a real job).

What shits me the most, looking back on it, is that nobody could make a compelling argument for why I should take the course (apparently an pilot program run by the school).  The options for visual artists career-wise are many and varied, and were even then.  At worst I might have gone into store window-dressing or become a photographer's assistant.  But what I think I would have really liked to do is build a career in typography.  I think it would have suited my particular suite of talent, technical proficiencies and bordering-on-asbergian passion for detailed minutiae.  God knows, I wouldn't be any richer (poorer, more likely) than I am now, but I think the product of my labour might have been more worthwhile, more of a contribution to the whole.