Personal Narrative: You, Tin Woodman

You, Tin Woodman, and I are alike – we were both empty.
All around me, there were people whose lives were blossoming with youthful pastel colors while I stood half-disgusted, half-ashamed at the clean slate stretching back to my birth. It seemed that I had to be “creative” and “individualistic” – popular words these days – in sketching out my life, but how? I was lost in the dark, groping for the light switch while others forged ahead. This feeling of ostracism left me with fear and hatred towards the two words that seemed intent on taunting me with their unreachable ideals.
This paranoia crept beyond the borders of my brain and accompanied me out into my everyday life as I advanced into high school. I feverishly indulged in academics, sports,
music – anything that would posit my existence – in a vain attempt to patch the holes that punctuated my identity as an individual. Strangely, with some aid of the internet, I turned out to be good at whatever I chose to do. A’s in all courses. Second place in school badminton competition. Recuerdos de la Alhambra on the classical guitar. Advanced open water diver certificate on scuba diving. 1700 ELO at chess only after a month of practicing. Such feats earned me the nickname “AlphaGo” as a tribute to my uncanny ability to excel in almost anything I set my mind on; however, in my eyes, they were ugly splotches of color which were no better off than the blank of my canvas. If this was what my identity as an individual was – a machine that gobbled up YouTube tutorials or WikiHow articles and spat out results – I wanted nothing to do with it. It was in a recycling bin that I found a fragment of “Me”. A computer science textbook castoff by someone – probably a graduate. That day, I was introduced to my first computer program – 3 lines of code that prints “Hello World!” onto the monitor. The mystery behind how that snippet of code got my computer to print words was enough to make me turn to the next page. On each page was a morsel of knowledge that left my brain aching for more, and before I knew it, I had fallen in love.
Having studied in a school where most of the curriculum was focused on liberal arts, I was on my own.
Everyone around me had trouble understanding what could possibly draw me to such a difficult language. But the truth is that I wasn’t even sure what made coding so fascinating to me. The only thing I knew was that I was captivated by its intricacy and the ability to express my thoughts in neat lines of brackets and semicolons. There was no stopping once I started tapping away at the keyboard. Even though using computers was banned in our school dormitory, I always found a way to sneak in my laptop and trade off sleep for more perfect, beautiful code. I was a computer freak. After months of single-minded dedication to my love, my vision was beginning to clear up, and it became more and more obvious that your identity is not something that you strive to create or imitate, but grows with you since birth. Every course of action you take is a line, a stroke upon the canvas within you. You feel desperate because your picture is only a crude, formless silhouette; however, once you fall in love, you see the glimpse of the vignette called “Me”.
When I was programming I felt that I had finally touched upon myself – a computer mania who can play classical guitar, give anyone a hard time in badminton, scuba dive, and more. Now I see them not as crude splotches, but as masterful strokes that adds depth and dimension to the emerging picture of “Me”. University is a palette where I will find more color than I have ever imagined. I am anxious to see how “I” will turn
out.