Yara Shahidi

I was suppressing my curiosity, but I realized that made it so much easier to pick apart every potential decision rather than take action.

Now, while I can't speak for everyone's experiences, from conversations I've had with my peers and my mentors, I know this feeling isn't relegated to being 23.

Choosing to take on both college and entertainment at the same time, blending my two worlds, was a necessary recommitment to my curiosity.

I found such a joy in discovering just how much I didn't know.

Lessons came from everywhere.

Classes like hip-hop sampling on how neo-soul and blues became the basis to a new sound taught me how media can be used as a way of preserving legacy, as a way of bringing past cultures into the present.

Playing Tinkerbell gave me permission to reignite my imagination.

My class on W. E. B. Du Bois is where I discovered the name for our television production company, Seventh Son.

And building a television set in a writer's room gave me the ability to practice equitable hiring within an archaic system in real time.

And in an independent study created by Dr. Cornel West, I learned my biggest lesson of all.

See, there are certain elements of our society that we deem as universal, immovable truths when they're in fact subjective.

Not only are they subjective, they're oftentimes responsible for these systems of oppression, for these dangerous misconceptions about people, for this feeling of stuckness, this feeling like nothing can change.

And to me, these universal truths can range from everything as big as socioeconomic exploitation to that, are you sure about that, that stops you from going off on your own and exploring.

Conversely, this means academics and entertainment are most potent in their abilities to demonstrate alternate realities.

This lesson reinvigorated my love for these two spaces because I realized they'd always been primed for imagination and exploration and gave us the ability to explore what can blossom from curiosity.

This perspective shift taught me that I was thinking too small because I thought the task at hand was to merely alter these systems at play, rather than to imagine entirely new ways of being.

Because the results of curiosity are immeasurable, from Galileo's reordering of the universe to how the musician prints undefined masculinity for generations.

And oftentimes, these discoveries can jeopardize past ways of thinking.

I like to call the change that emerges from blossomed curiosities rupture.

If tradition is the result of repetition, then rupture is the introduction of something fresh.