Finding a New Path

photo by arantxa villa

Finding a New Path

by third-year Chris Farrar 

Life is a series of unprovoked encounters and constant changes in plans. The popular phrase is “we make plans, and the universe laughs,” and I had never truly encountered a life altering event to the extent of what happened my junior year of high school. Throughout my life, my parents had always talked about college, and what I would want to study. Since the third grade, I had wanted to research and build prosthetics. Unfortunately, something stood in the way of that goal; I am mathematically challenged. Beyond basic addition, I am cripplingly addicted to my phone’s calculator. Naturally, engineering became an increasingly impossibility for me. That left me, as a sixteen year old boy for whom college had always been a constant nagging topic of conversation, scared for my future. I was lost, anxious, and growing depressed. I knew I would still end up in college, but the choice of where was becoming equally anxiety-inducing for me. Initially I was set on Georgia Tech, because of engineering. However, that was now off the table. West Georgia would be fine, but what would I study? My girlfriend was dead set on the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs), but the cost and distance from home made Athens little more than a hopeful dream.

Up until my junior year I had been familiar with Stephen King, but I had never been interested in reading the author’s work. But for whatever reason, perhaps due to my friends being fans of the recent IT movie, I decided to give the author a chance. And because of the recent film based on the series, I decided to read Stephen King’s seven book series, The Dark Tower. The series, for the uninitiated, focuses on a futuristic, post apocalyptic fantasy setting with elements of American westerns. Cowboys, deserts, the series is essentially The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly meets Lord of the Rings. It’s a lot of outlandish ideas made even weirder by Stephen King’s own insane imagination. The series also deals with themes of obsession, addiction, redemption, and identity crises. For a depressed, aimless teenager, this was exactly what I needed. I needed a series to completely lose myself in, characters who were just as confused about their positions in life as I was, and I needed to go on this seven book long journey to give myself time to focus on something other than a hypothetical future. At this point in my life this odd, fantastical, cacophony of multiversal shenanigans (that has been widely deemed by the majority of King’s fanbase as too crazy and weird) was the most comforting thing for me. I decided after finishing the series to watch the film adaptation, and to my horror, it did not do the series justice at all. By attempting to condense a seven book series into an hour and a half, the film was left with no cohesive plot, and character arcs that sped by like lightning. The book series was so comforting, and the film so agonizing, that I made it a life goal to prove to myself I could create a better script. Finding the EMST program at UGA gave me purpose again, to become a screenwriter and create stories that will inspire others, the way King’s novels inspired me. If I had to form my experience into a moral, it would be this; be open to the randomness of life. You can never be sure of what the future holds, and you never know what experiences will open new doors to you. I never anticipated a book series and a bad movie adaptation would change my life course from engineering to screenwriting, but it did. Life is random, but that isn’t always a bad thing!