Here We Go

As a child, I was the kid who dreaded receiving journals as gifts. I always liked them as objects, as I liked books- pretty, new cover, soft, smooth pages to touch. I admired their purpose, that of imprinting images of the mind into a medium where they could be kept for reference; it seemed noble, and important. But unlike my beloved books, their identity was nebulous- no beginning, middle, or end, and no inherent entertainment value, just seemingly unending space demanding that you find the correct things to fill up the lines. The perfectionist in me dreaded unwrapping the little book, so pure and new with a soft-looking white bunny on the cover, a spine that made little cracking noises when opened for the first time, and pale pink sheets with lines that morphed into tendrils at the beginning and end of each page. I knew, at that moment my ears heard the cracking, and I took the cap off the pen, that this pure thing was only going to be marred by my gawky handwriting and rambling thoughts. It's all downhill from the moment you slice open the wrapper.

And thus is an early example of my mind's career in worry and self-deprecation. I would never say that thoughtfulness and consideration have not been good qualities to have, as I stand by their importance to humanity, but in extremes they can eat away at spirit and ambition like global warming to an igloo. I was the one who filled a few hours and an equal amount of pages of attempts in that journal, was unimpressed by her tone of writing and inconsistency of penmanship, and became uninterested in her failed attempt to capture thoughts and meaning in her life. No more pages were filled, and the journal went into a shoebox.

Perhaps it is this type of recognition of the importance of aesthetics and context that sent me to be a designer, and want to create things that were real, and physical in their meaning. I always have liked words and language, however. A creative spirit, I tested the waters of words after spelling bees by going to young writers' workshops when I was in elementary school, then writing extensive puppet-show plays of books in middle school, and finally taking creative writing and poetry courses in high school, and eventually, college. Somewhere in high school, thanks to patient and inspiring teachers, I started developing a voice in my writing that I could begin to embrace, and I wrote with less hesitance, and cringed less when someone read my words. Always searching for the correct description to evoke a thought or feeling, I vascillate between looking for the perfect words and combining a string of them in hopes that something will elicit the correct response. For me, language can be the yin to design's yang; where design shows you exactly what is and how it works, how it makes you feel, illiciting feelings externally, language describes what could be and shows what cannot be seen or touched, bringing feeling from an amorphous, internal place.

As someone who spends more time with the art of design and aesthetics, the lingual and literary part of me seems to ask the rest of me, "when is it my turn?" Do I look to find a niche in my field where I can write and use words in design? As language, like design, is an art, they both serve to invoke emotion, and elicit feeling, and can work to strengthen eachother, as an art history lecture and textbook is essential to a well-rounded degree in sculpture. However, I personally struggle with where and when I will inject words into my creativity...will it take a shift of focus within my career, or should I look to picking up a separate pursuit, such as delving into short fiction or poetry again? Should good conversations and correspondence be quenching my pursuit of verbal communication? I recently wrote a narrative for a design that took the form of a children's book, and I thought, I could get back into writing. The girl who once idealized words to the point of fear, of publicly drowning in a sea of verbal self-humiliation, would like to get her toes wet again.

We'll see how it goes. Hopefully this time I might get more than a few days in on these pages.