The role of creativity

^^^more pictures from England because I miss it so much^^^

The theme of my life lately has been to be creative. I am doing my best to eat, sleep, and breathe creativity. I've been doing my research. I've read books, browsed blogs, picked up the big girl camera, and carried around a pocket notebook pretty much constantly. And I see progress. Nothing remarkable by other people's standards, but stuff I'm proud of, and that's all that matters, right? I'm learning that creativity isn't some inherent quality that you either have or you don't, but it is something you can develop. I'm also learning that different art forms have different places and meaning in my life. For example, at the beginning of the school year, I was kind of floating around in a giddy dreamland and so I made lots of cutesy little girl doodles- lots of bows and curly-qs and the like. Then about the middle of the year I made some new friends and took their advice and started writing again, just like when I was younger. When the words started to run out I turned to photography. Kind of tired of the preppy dreamland, I searched for something moody and different. Enter my obsession with hipsters and photography. The stark contrasts made by light and the immense storytelling power of a single image are so intriguing to my teenage soul, and I just can't seem to soak up enough. It's like a thirst that I can't quench.

Maybe my creative tendencies are an underlying desire to return to my beginnings. To relive the dreams of my childhood, the days spent carrying marble composition notebooks and writing stories about all of my best friends. A quest to remember what it felt like to be naive and unconcerned with the judgements of others and the expectations of the adult world. And as I'm doing this, being creative, I find that more and more often, my mind is full of ideas. Now my head is swimming with setups for pictures and snatches of stories that I scramble to write down. I have this untamable desire to record all of the beautiful details of life, all of the images and emotions that make up my little world. This intense need to document this time in my life, so that I can look back and remember how it felt to be a teenager, how it felt to be learning and growing up and getting to where I want to be. I hope I get there.

Sincerely, mad