Do What I Can’t
This is Iverson and this is my story.
I was born in a small town in Northeast China and came to the United States for the first time in the summer of 2016. Starting my freshman year of college at Parsons, I declared my major as architectural design. Do not ask me why architecture. It is the same question as “what’s the meaning of life?” To me, the meaning of life is to constantly chase and search the meaning of life, and my way of doing that is to DO WHAT I CAN’T.
Skimming through my first-year work at Parsons, I do not see what I have accomplished, but how I worked on and what I learned from them. Tracing my work back to the first day of college enables me to realize the amazing working process and project development habit. I stood in Union Square for one pouring and freezing afternoon, in order to get a time lapse for my video. I went to the Bronx four days in a row during weekdays to complete my interviews. I learned how to code a website by myself and wrote 4007 coding lines in two days. I read four books and dozens of journals to enrich my Seminar 1 Final. I wrote poetry every week to make my weekly investigation interesting and fun to read. I dressed up and attended every community board Regular Council Meeting to deepen my understanding upon neighborhood and urban.
The last-summer Iverson would have had no idea that his capability would be infinite. I am obsessed with the feeling of ceaselessly creating something, a film, a model, a soundtrack, a poem, a paper, a drawing, a website. A story, my own story. Knowing that you can’t is discouraging to most people. However, knowing that I can’t is only another exciting hypothesis to me that I will devote as much time as I can to until I prove it wrong. My working method that emerged from my fist year at Parsons is to make things harder. Is this assignment difficult enough? If not, how can I make it more challenging and do it in a more interesting way? I believe I have applied this method to my every course, every assignment, every project.
In the most recent project developed from a course named What Makes A Village, I spent hundreds of hours in The Bronx County, shooting films, doing interviews, connecting with local government and organizations. Now, I am going to have my first screening on Thursday, 11th May and first personal exhibition in August in the Bronx Health Action Center. This project goes way beyond the course itself, but a truly long-term collaboration with the departments, organizations, and communities in the Bronx.
Another significant project happening in my life is to make a change at West 4th Street Courts. My professors from Inte Studio 2 and Inte Seminar 2 not only stood behind me all the way along but also contributed inspiring while practical suggestions for me to better insert myself into the community and make it thrive. This project has also become so much a part of me that though I do not see a clear end at this point, I have no intention to stop.
Now, I am sitting in the middle of the classroom, writing this reflection post. I thought: How can I make it interesting for myself and whoever is going to read it. I am a storyteller. This is my story. I DO WHAT I CAN’T. You should too.