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I’m like, mildly talented at a lot of artistic things. People LOVE to tell me that means I should do them professionally. It’s very nice of them to think I could make it in these fields with what I think are pretty average talents, but . . . when they tell me making it a career is the only thing that makes sense, or that I’m wasting something if I don’t use it to make money . . . that’s where I get pretty annoyed.
It’s okay to do something just for fun, and never try to be a professional. I struggled a lot when I was a kid thinking about which thing I loved enough that I would find all the frustrating, difficult parts to be worth it. Even though I loved drawing and singing, it always seemed like writing was the default for most of my expression, and it was something I thought I genuinely had a chance at succeeding in (largely because I was also willing to put the work in). Nowadays I just enjoy doodling and singing as hobbies, but people still sometimes ask me why I would make comics without charging people for them or why I don’t try to go pro with my singing and become a recording artist or a singer/songwriter. Why? Because I don’t want to. Given my experience in writing, I know how much you have to put in before you get on that level, and I know I’m just plain not willing to put that time in for any other art.
Art is HARD. And it’s fine to do it for fun.
To “decide” is to “strike down” or “kill”. It is to prune your decision tree by cutting off branches.
People often ask me about music as well, and after college I had an offer to join the Liberated Wailing Wall, but “decided” on a computer career instead – cutting off that other potential life story.
Ruth (in the Bible) had to choose a field to glean in. She choose the field of Boaz, and that “decided” her life story. We’ll never know what awaited her in one of the other fields.
As Aslan says to Lucy in “Prince Caspian”: “No one is told what *would* have happened.”