Finding My Senses
Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, and Touch. The five senses that drive the human body and give the inclination of idea, creativity and thought. It is how we perceive the world and describe our story with the use of similarity.
The world as a child is confusing and mysterious. It has so many levels and complexities, creating ideas and questions that are unanswerable to the young, undeveloped mind. When I was a kid, my head spun with ideas to tell the world, I was always thinking of the different perspectives or the ways a story could be told. My mind was a tangled spider web with a thousand different intertwined thoughts. It frustrated me that I couldn’t visualize the words I wanted to say or piece together the solution to every question.
As soon as I was able to hold a pencil and form a sentence, I grabbed a notebook from my mom's desk and filled it front to back with the creativity and chaos that filled my young mind. I was seven at the time and had just discovered the power of pencil to paper. This indescribable power drove me to take this 6 inch notebook everywhere I went to describe my constant surroundings. Every page was a new potential to tell a different story. Anything that popped into my seven year old brain, I felt the immediate inclination to describe it in my notebook. I taped leaves to describe the atmosphere around me and perfume swatches to remember the smell of the cologne in a magazine. I used tape to create a translucent page that appeared normal to the eye but felt like snake skin to the fingertip. This notebook was my super power and the way I perceived the world. Unlike the world around me, it was simple and it answered my questions using my own logic and creativity.
Throughout my childhood, my favorite toy was neither my American girl doll nor my robotic dog. It wasn’t any of my stuffed animals nor little pet shop people. It was a hundred page notebook, stitched together with a stiff binding and a little elastic to hold it all together. It had a front page to put your name and phone number and a built in pocket at the end. I cherished it with my life and took it wherever I went. At the end of each day it was the person I would tell everything too and she would listen.
This inclination to write about the world around me didn’t stop when I got to middle school but only manifested with my discovery of a video camera. Suddenly I could be my own story teller, filming the life surrounding me while writing how I truly felt. School became a side-hustle as video creating and storytelling would become my true passion. Creating videos was the visual that led me to see the world in a different point of view. I could create entertainment at the surface, showing the two sides to every story--the video perception and the understanding from my written notebook intertwined to give my life a new meaning.
When I open my notebook at the end of the day, the whole world around me falls away. Writing isn’t just a tool that I use to perceive the world but is now a tool to cherish its natural divinity. No matter how stupid my entry is for the day, the story it tells holds a million meanings. I use my photography to paint a picture of the world around me. Each picture holds a story of a person I care for or a moment I want to cherish forever. Drawings and paintings fill the empty spaces and illustrate the things I feel and hear in the atmosphere around me. Each page is covered from top to bottom in illustrations that describe who I am. Each month is a new beginning and a new story to tell.
My whole life I was always waiting for that epiphany, the moment where I realized my true passion in life. That moment where the superhero either discovers his powers for the first time or the girl finds her true love. I wanted a huge sign that shouted “this is what you are good at, now do it!” but I never found that revelation.
I never found it because it had been a part of me since such a young age. It had been so intertwined in my daily life that it was like brushing my teeth or tying my shoes. The seven year old that used her five senses to illustrate the world around her was the same girl that turned her daily life into art. My childhood became my epiphany and as I looked back at each year of my life I had a timeline of the art, visuals, photography, and graphics that described my life. My whole life I’ve left a physical paper-trail of my soul, evidence to who I am and what I enjoy. It has allowed me to reflect on who I have become and who I want to be in the future.
Just like my first notebook, I want to use the way I perceive the world to tell the stories of people around me using video, art, or writing. Physically writing out my life since I was little has allowed me to be more observant of other people's stories, realizing that each one is important.