A Personal Note

I have also completed 6 years of university through much adversity, illness, and uncertainty and in a few weeks will be receiving my degree.

It has been quite an eventful few months, and my brain has earned a vacation. So for the next few days I'm going to relax, watch some TV, play some video games (my WoW buddies probably think I've died) read some books and let the big life changing thoughts sit on the back burner for a little while.

But before I go, I wanted to comment on what this experience has meant to me, how Evoke has changed my life.

I have said it before, but I want to say it again. I have always been an Evoke agent. I was just waiting for them to call me up. All my life I have thought about the big issues, the global issues, the human rights violations, how everything seems to be going wrong and yet things just keep going.

And I know where I get it, you see my Mum made me this way. I don't know how she did it, neither does she. My Mum is the sort of woman who, when she was little worried that she was the second coming of Jesus and that she wasn't doing a very good job. And now, I'm that sort of woman too.

I knew and cared about female genital mutilation at 14, I was suggesting environmental debates at 15. I have always known about the world, and I have always cared about the world.

But while I am very grateful to my mother for making me the person I am, it can also suck, a lot. You can get overwhelmed with all of the caring and extremely frustrated with all the people who aren't caring.

I began my university career in the anthropology department, I was full of big ideas and big plans. The world was made up of people, and if people could be understood they could be changed, and all that caring could be put to use. But the more I studied the more I realized that even when you were studying human beings, what made us do the things we do, still nobody cared. In fact it was important that you didn't care, that you were "objective." In order to succeed in the study of human beings, one must pretend not to be one. It was such a blow, such a jarring reality. I just had to get away from it.

My choice was then to move on to the most feeling subject I could think of, one which had accompanied me my wh*** life. I became a music major. Surely in music, you have to care. One cannot listen to Barber's Adagio for strings and not care, one cannot attempt to emulate Mozart or Billie Holiday or Eric Clapton and not care.

Unfortunately, my brain had already filled its caring quotient, there is only so much you can do. And while making music is a great way to express all of that feeling, in order to study music you must invert that process, turn all of that emotion in on itself, examine it, separate it into its parts and try and replicate it, make variations of it and reproduce it in other ways, remix it to make something new. I was wholly unprepared to do this.

I have managed to scrape through, I will get my degree, and it is an achievement of which I am immensely proud.

Unfortunately, as I was nearing the end of my studies, I realized I still did not have an outlet for all my concern, all that knowledge, all of that awareness of what the world is, and what it could be, was still with me. I had been trying for years to pour it all into games, and books and movies and TV, to care about only those worlds that worked on the notion that the good guys won, because they were safe. And that would have to do. I would care but nothing would happen in the real world, that's the way I thought life would be.

And that was when Evoke came along.

Here were thousands of other people who cared about it all, just like me. Who knew the world could be better, should be better, and cared deeply about the fact that it wasn't.

Not only that, Evoke made the audacious claim that just by writing, just by taking pictures or making videos, I could do something! Just using my brain the way I always have could change things. For this idea, I shall always be grateful.

Thank you to those I have worked with, thank you to those who have encouraged me, and thank you to those who made Evoke.

Thank you for reminding me that I do not have to settle. I do not have to settle for a learning environment that does not care, I do not have to settle for a world that will not change (virtual or otherwise), and I do not have to settle for a life of not caring.

I'm going to look for work that matters, I'm to look for friends who care, and I'm going to look for a world I can change, because thanks to Evoke I now know for certain that these things exist.

Thank you so much,

Kate Morrison