on (maybe) being a blank flank
If you've seen the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, you've heard the term "blank flank". Every pony in the MLP universe eventually gets a "cutie mark", a symbol on their flank that represents their talents and purpose in life. Some ponies, however, take a little longer –or a lot longer– than usual to get a cutie mark. Three younger ponies, Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo, form a club called the Cutie Mark Crusaders. They hope that by trying as many different activities as they can, they'll discover their special talents and finally earn their marks. Some humans take a lot longer than usual to figure out who we are, too. In my late teens and early 20s, I shed a lot of tears over how directionless I felt. Having grown up rural and pretty isolated, I hadn't been exposed to many possible futures. I knew I liked art, but college advisors would shoot me down immediately when I said so. I came home very excited from a tour of a university's interior design department, but my mom said so many derogatory things about interior design that I abandoned that idea. My grades and test scores were high... and it was the early 2010s, when the humanities were seen as fluff, STEM was on a pedestal, and the stereotype of the hyper-logical autistic tech whiz was alive and well. I heard "you should go into engineering" or "you'll cure diseases one day!" more times than I can count, but deep down, that never felt quite right. Nothing felt quite right.
I was a blank flank. And like the Cutie Mark Crusaders, I toyed with a lot of things. Biology (I loved hands-on labs and field assignments, but the required chemistry classes were a slog). Set design (I felt like an outsider trying to break into an already close-knit group of theater kids, and was way too shy to even attempt an acting class). Graphic design (it might be a way to earn money, but I don't love it, and my back hurt awfully after four hours at a computer). I thought about architecture too, but the nearest architecture program was on a gigantic campus, and the 10-hour work days common for architects are not for me. I was also afraid of being pigeonholed. (There's an MLP episode about that too, "Marks and Recreation", in which a camper at cutie mark day camp does not want to get a mark at all.) What if being seen as The Biologist meant I couldn't also be The Artist? I wish I could say that in the end, I got my metaphorical cutie mark. And maybe I have. Maybe it's a color wheel, representing the intersection of art and science. Or maybe it's something to do with manatees, my favorite gentle giants. Or maybe it isn't, and maybe I haven't. Maybe my former teachers and academic advisors would be disappointed to find out I'm just a part-time library assistant who makes weird art sometimes, who keeps a silly website for fun but has zero interest in the tech industry. (I once hid in a bathroom at a restaurant to avoid being spotted by a former advisor.) I'm not even sure I've fully found my niche as an artist.
Honestly, maybe more and more people are feeling like blank flanks these days. There's a lot of pressure to find a hyper-specific niche: to pick the correct box and stay in it if you want likes on social media, or a good career. But humans aren't cartoon ponies, and we don't all discover one lifelong purpose in childhood or early adulthood. Sometimes our "cutie marks" appear later than that, and sometimes they change shape. And maybe that's okay.