Empty paint tins of Seething Red and Melancholy Blue litter the floor. Scattered paint brushes with split ends lie vertically on stacks of canvases against paint-splattered walls. Notebooks spilling with ideas and parchment pages pinned up haphazardly, crammed with words glittering with inky promise. If a person happened upon the inner workings of my heart, this is what they would find. I communicate through the metaphors and images that bubble up within myself to express how I experience and view the world. At different points in time, I have felt so anxious that I thought my mind would shatter in a thousand different directions. Thus, I drew a girl, curled around herself as the world sat on her chest, waves of dull grey slowly rising to her mouth. I lived and loved so intensely that it has become commonplace to take out a pen, writing furiously. After so much repetition, reaching out to create became a reaction, and then my passion.

When I take the meandering path into my future, I envision myself writing and creating, double majoring in Creative Writing and Art Illustration. I see myself in college, placing ideas down with vigor, and receiving constructive criticism through my professors. I gaze into a time where I experiment with artistic mediums, relishing in the time that I will be able to simply create. I hope to watch myself write books starting in college, publishing them with the same zeal that I had when I was eleven, and just learning that I could write entire worlds with a flick of my wrist. I wish to observe my art grow into something even I cannot imagine. Something that can reach into other people’s hearts and alight the passions that loom just beyond their reach.

Although my heart can shy away from the pain of life, I would never aspire to isolate myself from society. Instead, I aim to show the world my mind, and in the process, water the seeds of self-exploration. When I paint, I want my audience to reflect on their relationship with themselves and others. I want them to notice how they think and how their thoughts affect their words, eyes, and actions. I long to make them feel understood, comforted, challenged, and, most of all, inspired, rousing them to become their own heroes. In a society that can be so bent on getting the next thing done, creativity is needed to ground people to themselves. Without imagination, we would all run through life with inflexible ideals and selfish pursuits. We would lose the community art brings, and with it, the change others can produce for the making of a better future.