Dear Readers,

I want to take you on a journey of my life.  It is long and it won’t entirely make sense.  But this journey might make you think about your life.  Who are you?  Why are you the way you are?  I have these answers and the answers came so unexpectedly that I wanted to share my experience with all of you. 

Going through everything will take more than one post.  Please, stick around and read.  If it’s not an eye-opener to you perhaps it will at least entertain.

The way I am going about this story is through history.  These past two semesters at Brigham Young University I took a history class.  Oh how I love this class!!  Not only was it about history, it was about the creativity of history!  The creativity of the people in history!  It was wonderful!  At the end of every semester, we did a final project.  You had to incorporate something in the time period we had studied.  For example, the first semester went from the beginning of time to 1500AD.  The second semester went from 1500AD to the present.

These following posts all come from the project I created for my second semester final project.

It begins with an explanatory paper:

I always wanted to understand me.  For how often I talk to myself in my head, I could never seem to grasp what was being said up there.  I wanted so badly to know who I was and where I was going, but I never had the guts to try and figure it out.  I wanted to be that girl who was crazy and loud just so I would know at least pretend to know what I was doing.  I seem to understand why a girl may talk only about herself, but I can never figure out why I stayed quiet when so much was happening inside of me.

Today, as I look through history and find correlation after correlation in the countries of Europe and in the people who lead.  I wonder what they were thinking.  Why would anyone choose to murder millions of people just because they believed something differently?  Why write something so moving that the paper convinces everyone in the country to take the papers proclaiming side?  Why put the country you love over yourself? 

In order to understand, I took a few people, briefly outlined what they are known for, and then took my experiences and connected the dots.  I analyzed my life, every detail that I can remember of how I came to be who I am today. 

So, who am I?  I am a girl who struggled with finding where I fit in in all of this.  Instead of searching for that spot with my name written boldly on it, I allowed my parents, my teachers, and even those I didn’t know place me where they thought I was supposed to be.  They can’t see my name, so how in the world were they to know how wrong they were?  I had to step up and say “No.  My name is not here on this spot.  But I will search high and low for where it is and I will claim it loud and proud.” 

I can’t say I haven’t found my name because I have.  I just know that I can say I haven’t sat down yet.  I’m still searching for understanding of why it is so far from where I had been placed only one year ago.  I still heed the counsel of those who wrongly placed me; I still long for someone to tell me what to do.  But who am I to move my name, imperfect as I am, I could never put it in the right spot alone.

This project was almost entirely for my benefit.  It gave me time to sit down and finally come to the conclusion that I know who I am.  I may have struggled in the past, but here and now in the present, I am not struggling what so ever.   In order to be creative, one must first have a reason to be creative.  For me, there was nothing to encourage creativity.  My wronged thought process kept telling me that there was nothing in the world that has already been done.  Nothing new can come to pass.  Oh how wrong I was! 

In gaining an understanding of why creativity helps a person grow and be better, I no longer can go a second of my day without wanting to add some creativity to it.  I am grateful I was able to learn the importance of creativity without spending too much of my life in the dark. 

Not only did I use my poorest skills to create something, I did the unthinkable for me.  I admitted to myself what has really been going on in my life.  Why I chose to stand in the shadows when I was being beckoned to light – this question has finally been answered.  And in a way that is beyond comparison. 

The scrapbook is a representation of my life in a story.  To make it easier to understand, I briefly showed those in history who have had similar experiences or in one case, I differed so greatly from.  I took my motifs and compared them to these historical people’s motifs and learned that maybe I was consciously thinking one thing and subconsciously thinking another.  These are all just brainstorming ideas but that have helped me look at everything I do and ask…why?

“Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.” – Carl Jung

“Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Einstein

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”

– Einstein

“God wisely designed the human body so that we can neither pat our own backs nor kick ourselves too easily.” – Unknown

“There is a part of me that wants to write, a part that wants to theorize, a part that wants to sculpt, a part that wants to teach…. To force myself into a single role, to decide to be just one thing in life, would kill off large parts of me.” – H. Prather

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert F. Kennedy

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.  The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”  ~Sylvia Plath

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”  ~Elmore Leonard