Man of Science, man of Art

I grew up as a man of science.

Both my parents worked in the sphere of science – they met when they both joined a large corporate producer of chemicals as their first jobs out of University.

My mother later retrained as a teacher – more specifically a chemistry teacher, and my dad stayed with the same chemical company his whole working life.

So, I guess it felt like science was in my blood. I enjoyed the science disciplines at school, and got good grades in all of them. Chemistry and physics made sense – they were logical and predictable. They explained how things worked, and what’s more you got to demonstrate that this was the case. That suited me.But was I really a scientist? From my mid teens through into my late twenties I thought I was. I studied Computer Science at University, and then went on to specialise as a Systems Administrator in the IT business. Not science in the traditional sense, but certainly science in the modern sense.

It felt like science mattered to me. Art on the other hand, I could take or leave. I dabbled a little in photography, but it never stuck. Arts that required social interaction weren’t even contemplated.

Then one day, I found my voice. I’d enjoyed English at school, and in particular the creative writing assignments. When I started writing a blog a couple of years ago, I’d not written seriously since those days back at school. It was immediately addictive. I’d found a form of self expression that really mattered to me. I loved the way I could play with words, and how I could make them express the way I felt about things. It didn’t matter whether what I wrote was any good, nor whether it flowed well, or even if I mixed up tenses, which I often did.

This was art. The words may often have expressed logical and predicable things, but they flowed in a way that was anything but logical. I may like science with a passion, but my writing expressed passion in a way that science never did.

My old blog has gone, and now I write here instead. I still feel the same passion I felt when I first started writing.

So here’s the question – did I grow up as a man of science due to the background of my parents, or was it more to do with having Asperger’s? My Asperger’s makes me crave logic in a world where not much is predictable and logical. People certainly aren’t. I wonder these days if my love of chemistry and physics was because they provided me with concrete logical answers to things. I could depend on them.

Maybe that’s the case, but one thing is certain. I’m not solely a man of science these days – I’m a man of art too.

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