Reflections

Mandala

This I Believe Essay

Juan Zepezauer

This I Believe Essay

Focusing only on personal responsibility far too often causes people to ignore or neglect the bigger picture. I mean this in two ways: first, if you only focus on what you’re “supposed” to do you can lose sight of other things that are important in your life; second, if you only think about things in terms of whether you’re working hard enough, you often end up ignoring the extenuating circumstances and blaming yourself for things beyond your control. It seems to me that far too often this balance between personal responsibility and the bigger picture is tipped unsustainably towards only looking at one’s individual actions and responsibilities.

As a student I’ve found that I almost always struggle with completing my work on time, but as much as my more anxiety-riddled parts of my brain would like to accuse me of it, I don’t do this because I’m apathetic about school or because I simply don’t want to put in the effort. In fact, I’ve never found myself at the end of any class having found that I didn’t understand or learn anything. It can be far too easy to fall into a circle of feeling useless for not being able to keep up, to forget that I’m taking a full schedule of difficult classes at once with a ADHD-infested brain that seems unwilling to cooperate, or that the reason I didn’t get too much work done last period was because I was busy trying to help my friends understand the material. 

I believe that a lot of what’s necessary to keep this balance is keeping a watchful eye on the environment you’re placed in just as much as the work you’re putting in.

One particular example I can remember of this is my middle school band class. In fifth grade we had to choose between an art program and a music program, and despite my protests, my parents forced me to take music instead of art. I did incredibly poorly. However, that wasn’t the real issue; the problem was that, fundamentally, band was not a good environment for me, for a number of reasons, the first of which being that my brain actually doesn’t process music correctly. Musical Anhedonia is what I’ve seen it called, music just fundamentally doesn’t have the same effect on me that it has on others.The second reason is that I have ADHD, and when put under a bit of stress, I can be prone to sensory overload. As you can imagine from a middle school band class, there is very much sensory to do the overloading. I was awful at playing music, I hated having to practice, every period of band was my most stressful of the day, and I blamed myself for not being able to succeed in an environment that was fundamentally incompatible with me. 

I believe that too many people make the mistake of judging all things purely in terms of personal responsibility. It pushes people to overstress themselves, and it causes people to fail to examine whether they’re in an environment that they can actually succeed in.

Photoshop Art

Design PSA

Juan Zepezauer

See The Bigger Picture

The message that I ended up going with for my PSA was “Focusing only on personal responsibility often neglects the bigger picture.” The image I ended up creating for this was two people walking through the rain one with a newspaper the other with an umbrella, with the umbrella in a complementary orange color to the background to emphasize it. In the background, I added a healthy amount of fog and a crowd of people also carrying orange umbrellas. I hoped to convey the importance of examining extenuating circumstances rather than only looking at individual actions, and examining broader systems rather than individuals.

I created almost all of the image in Illustrator, (with the exception of the layer at the very back which is just some colors blended together with a Photoshop smudge brush). For the fog, I made heavy use of the gradient mesh tool and also briefly used the new freeform gradients to try creating a simple puddle. All of the people in the image are very simplistic and have their faces obscured both because it’s not necessary to convey the message and because I don’t have very much experience with drawing people. For the message font, I went with Highway Gothic for a clean easily readable sans serif font. The crowd is also made up only of simple abstract shapes so that it blends into the background more easily and helps add a bit of depth.