Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.

We all have something to say about our family. They drive us nuts. The constant pestering, worrying and antagonizing is awful. I get it, it's because they love us, but it doesn't mean we have to enjoy it. 

I look at family in the traditional sense of blood relations and in the sense of friends who are the family God let us choose (how cliche, I know). Both have molded and shaped me into the person I am today, and they continue to do so. My creativity stems from my interaction with them. 

Generally speaking, your family can inspire you to do some pretty crazy things. I once rode the swings at the fair with my sister after I told her I was sick. I finally proved to her I was sick by throwing up half processed gyro all over the crowd below. 

Granted, not everything we do for family is bad. Sometimes it's quite good. 

The scene above is from Little Miss Sunshine. If you haven't seen it, shame on you. The movie is about a strained family and their journey to finding each other again. This is one of the final scenes of the movie, when the youngest child Olive performs her dance routine to Super Freak at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. Seeing the reaction from the crowd, her once broken family joins her on stage in support. 

This is a great example of the outrageous things we do for the people we love. They give us the freedom to let loose and be silly. When you're being crazy, you're more open and more creative. When my sister and I are goofing around, I feel awesome. 

Because of how much time I spend with family, both related and not, I am a firm believer that they shape who we are and how we think. Yes, we can still be original but we are still products of our environment. 

Discovering this quote helped me shape my thoughts on the influence of family. I think it's one of those hard to grasp notions that every interaction helps to mold us in every way. Especially creativity. 

When I think about the times I've been inspired, I realize that the ideas came from conversations with the people I'm closest with. Whether it was my father or best friend, something about talking to them caused me to flow with creativity. I think that without strong connections to others, we lose an important element of what causes creativity. 

To define family in the simplest terms, a family is about love. Sometimes we don't get love from our biological family, but we find it anywhere we can. In fact, most of life pursuits involve love, whether it be in the traditional sense or in our love of creating and living. In some way, we all live for our love. 

I decided to check the greatest love letter of all for a quote about love and its importance in your life. If you're not aware, I'm referring to the Bible. 

This verse from Colossians 3:14 really stood out to me. It's so simple yet profound, "most of all let love guide your life."

When love is guiding your life, you are filled with it in some capacity. When you have love, you have creativity. It is a huge force in life and without it what you do is empty. Surrounding yourself with your family creates love. 

Families inspire through loving, making you be silly and molding you. Without realizing it, these things happen to us regardless of how we feel about it. Without these things, we wouldn't be the creative beings God intended us to be. 

Living young, wild and free.

Freedom is one of those great things that means something different to each of us. Personally, I view freedom as the gift to be exactly who you are. When you're free, you're invincible. 

Currently, I view my freedom as an extension of my youth. For a long time, I was trying to grow up too fast and be too mature. I was afraid to live my life. After I read the Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, my perspective changed. 


Now my level of creativity reflects how young I'm feeling. When I wake up with a lot to do, I tend to feel like an old woman bound to my routine. When I'm spontaneous and realize that work can wait, I tend to be off the charts creatively. 


These days, when I'm feeling a little too old, I listen to this song by Fun. 

It's called We Are Young, and every single time I listen to it, I'm inspired. Everything about it intrigues me. It's not about making good choices or past regrets, it's about embracing the fact that at this point, we're free to be young. I think sometimes students in general become overwhelmed with the haunting thoughts of our futures, but this song is a reminder that the future can wait because tonight we are young. 

My favorite poet/person to find quotes from is e. e. cummings. Typically, poetry is not my favorite form of expression, but I love cummings' style. I love him so much that his quote "It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are" inspired my tattoo.

If you're wondering, it's on my hip. Not a tramp stamp. It symbolizes this time in my life where I'm finally figuring out who I'm supposed to be and leaving behind the person I thought I was.

I searched Google Images for pictures of e.e. cummings quotes, and I found the following:

While this wall decal isn't necessarily centered around youth, it still makes the point that believing in yourself leads to unlimited curiosity and creativity. Being young is about finding yourself and accept whoever that person is. When I read this quote, I not only want to wall decal, I also realize that it takes the confidence that I'm creative to excel. 

I found this picture in my pursuit of information and I loved the message behind it. It serves as a reminder that I'm growing older every second. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that life is for living and youth is for embracing. The more I realize it's important to enjoy my life, the more creative I am. This comes from a combination of experiencing new things and not being so anal about everything. Being young teaches me to keep calm and carry on. 

I. Love. This. 


First of all, the design element is simple but it makes clear the purpose. It's messy and deliberate. One of my greatest fears is failing. In my creativity class we talk a lot about how failing is just finding a way that doesn't work, but it still hurts when something doesn't happen the way you thought it should. This picture reminds me that I'm only 21, things aren't going to work out all the time for me. I'm still figuring out who I am and what I want to do, so how can I expect anything else? 


It's important to realize that in some way we all fail. But we should embrace failing because it teaches you more about a situation or yourself. If we all constantly succeeded, we would never grow as individuals. 


The greatest lesson I've learned to date is enjoy being young. Don't let yourself grow up too fast. Enjoy all the rejection, the heartbreak, the pain and the misery because someday we won't be experiencing so many new and exciting aspects of life. Realize that without the heartache and the failing, we would never discover who we truly are. 


Be inspired to be creative by your youth. When you're stuck in front of your computer trying to write a press release or design a new logo, escape and do something spontaneous. Allow ideas to flow to you instead of trying to generate them artificially. 


Being young is a unique experience that most can't wait to get away from. Embrace the challenges of growing up and embrace yourself. I guarantee your creativity will flourish. 


I believe Ralph Waldo Emerson summarized it best when he said, "Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant."

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

If you haven’t determined this already, I’m a bit of a worrier. There’s no limit to the things I worry about on a daily basis. Before I even knew about my problem, my mother would withhold certain information to keep me functioning.

Worrying is the main inhibitor of my creativity because I always see the negative consequences. In every situation. From my writing to something I say, I examine everything that can go wrong and worry more. It’s ridiculous.

As a child, I used my imagination as an escape from everything in life that worried me. I would gather my toys and create worlds and universes where things would go wrong, but they would always get better. I would recreate my troubles through my toys and subsequently solve them.

This continues to be a coping mechanism even into my adult life. It’s almost embarrassing to admit, but I still spend time each day dreaming of a life I don’t have where things go right and my problems work out and everything is happy. Surprisingly, it doesn’t make me sad or give me false hope about reality. It just helps me.

Unfortunately, there is one area where I can’t simply think my way into a new scenario.

Nature is one of the greatest gifts from God in my opinion. It’s constantly changing and becoming even more beautiful. Stellar Kart even has a line in one of their songs that adequately expresses my thoughts on nature:

“All around me Your creation brings me to my knees in adoration.”

Now you’d think that I’m about to discuss how a beautiful sunrise makes my cares go away and I’m enraptured. How the beauty of the ocean at dusk with the waves softly rolling against the white beach causes me to explode with wonderful ideas. How driving with the windows down during a summer evening with the right song playing makes me invincible.

While I enjoy everything listed, nature does something more than amaze me. It terrifies me. Growing up, I loved every horror movie you could throw at me. I don’t care how much blood or how many victims. They just didn’t scare me because I knew it was pretend. A killer wasn’t going to come through my dreams and kill me while I was asleep. In my opinion, my fears are much more practical.

I can’t watch Twister without hearing every gust of wind and thinking an F5 was about to rip my house apart. After I saw Dantes Peak I spent the next year of my life terrified lava was going to roll through my bedroom. Don’t even get me started on movies like Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow.

If I wanted to, I could list a thousand more movies that I can’t watch past a certain point in the day. It’s simple- acts of nature that can actually happen cause me to panic. I spend most of my time thinking of ways of escape or shelter in every situation. This line of thinking always leads me to believe that the worst has happened.

When I went to Cancun last March, I worried every day that a tidal wave would come sweeping across the beach and destroy the resort I was staying in. I still had a lot of fun, but the fears are never silent. [Unrelated but it was the Friday I left Cancun that Japan experiences the earthquake and tidal wave.]

I’ve been this way ever since I was a child. Every day that we learned about volcanoes and other natural disasters in school was a day I didn’t want to go. You’re probably going to think I’m crazy after reading this, but I think I function fairly well considering my overwhelming fears.

Most of the time, I’m completely fine. Yeah, things still scare me, but overall no big deal. Other times, it hits me and I can’t function. I will lie in bed terrified of everything that can go wrong and convince myself that the world is going to end before the next morning. This is a crazy view, but it helps to increase my belief that every single day is a miracle.

When I was younger, the fear would get so bad the only thing I could do was take my blanket and pillow into my parents’ bedroom and sleep on the floor. And clutch my toy dog Scruffy (my best friend and confidante since age three).

Because I’m now an adult, I cope without my parents. When it gets so bad that I can’t focus on anything except lying in my bed and panicking, I talk to God. I know this is technically praying, but I’m not really asking for anything or inquiring about anything. It’s really just a conversation.

I talk to God about my fears and how I know I’m ridiculous, and I thank Him profusely for allowing me to be alive each and every day. And I tell Him I’ll continue to do my best with the gifts He gave me because I know without Him, my gifts are wasted.

Typically, after a while I’ll fall asleep peacefully and sleep without nightmares. I don’t think God is mad that I fall asleep on Him though, considering He knew it was going to happen.

I also watch movies when I’m scared. Watching other peoples’ lives unfold in a mostly positive manner helps me realize it’s going to be ok. Sometimes, I don’t even change the movie. I’ll watch the same one over and over because it helps.

Eventually, after a few days, the panic is gone and I’m a normal functioning human. I’ve become significantly better. I can’t even remember the last time this affected me. Apparently, my coping methods are effective.

The point of this is simple- my imagination is awesome but overactive. It is not only good for creation, but also destruction of my sanity. I recognize this and often when I feel my imagination fighting against me, I retaliate and think positively and talk to God.

Maybe one week I’ll blog about things that strictly make me creative, not things that cause me to lack a creative spirit. 

Don't Bring Me Down

I had no idea what to write about for this weeks assignment. I just figured if nothing else I could BS my way through some post about why this pretty picture inspires me to be creative. Everything changed when I read the Yellow Jacket. 

Through my position in Student Senate, I planned an event called Can WU Duet (which was a success). Naturally, the newspaper did a story about the event. I wondered how they would handle it, considering the event was a day before it was on campus so a preview wouldn't work because the event would have happened and a follow up would be pretty late. Their solution was to write the story as if it already happened. Except a winner wasn't included.

Although I was a little upset, I thought it was still good to have exposure so I moved on. As I read the article, my anger returned. Because the event hadn't happened, there were many errors, including how many groups performed (two dropped out due to illness) and the spelling of a judge's name (she graduate last may from the Department of Communication). Also, like I mentioned before, they included how people voted, but not who won. 

On top of all that, my major was wrong and my co-chair from my committee in Student Senate had an incorrect title. To me, it's lazy journalism. As a writer for University Relations, I understand deadlines, but I also know that checking your facts is crucial. When something is published, there should never be speculation that information is inaccurate. 

This may seem like minor details and like I'm overreacting, but this isn't the first time an article about Senate or a Senate event has contained errors. I don't think it's a vendetta, but I also don't understand how they can't check what they're reporting before they publish the information. 

This all happened while I was in class, trying to work on a grants writing assignment. My mood was extremely negative and I couldn't focus on the task at hand. We talk a lot in class about how negativity makes you less creative, and I experienced that this morning. 

In fact, every time I think about the paper I'm upset and it puts a damper on my day. I'm not blaming the paper for that, it's more the fact that I hate when Senate is misrepresented in any form because I feel it reflects badly both on me as well as the entire body of students involved. 

As I write this blog, I'm reminding myself that while the article wasn't to my liking, the event was a success and that's what mattered. My hard work paid off into an event that was well-attended and much enjoyed. The article can't change that. 

I have a lot of writing to do this weekend, and instead of thinking about what went wrong, I'm going to focus on the good things. It's amazing that just by writing about the success of the event, I feel more creative and ready to do my work. 

And yes, I waited until the last second to do this and it may not be as long, but at the same time I'm actually applying concepts from class to a real life event instead of fabricating something to get the assignment done. 

Bows and Sparkles,

Chelsea