I enjoy making things. My grandma, apparently more in tune with the trends than I am, gave me a coloring book last year because she thought it would help me relax. I enjoyed thumbing through the pages, finding patterns I liked and filling in the white spaces with blues and yellows and everything in between. But Gammie really changed the game when she gave me a pack of small canvases and acrylic paints for Christmas. I picked up the brush - the finest tipped one, my favorite - and never turned back. I paint happy, brightly colored pictures of things like doughnuts, waterfalls and llamas wearing decorative saddles. For my friends' birthdays, I'll paint cards of narwhals and tacos wearing hats.
I also love to cook. I prefer to work mostly without recipes because their measurements and instructions make me frazzled. Instead, my culinary education comes from dishes my mom has made, from health-food Instagram accounts and from caring way too much about the fate of Chopped contestants. Specific creations are inspired by the things I find at my frequent hour-long escapades to Trader Joe's, on the most recent of which I purchased goat milk for the first time. (It's delicious in coffee.)
Other things I like to "make" include stories. I've spent the last couple of months writing funny articles for a food website, which sounds like it could be my calling, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how I could combine my passions to do something more meaningful. All I know is that I love words, (My most visited website is thesaurus.com, and I'm not sure if that's a good sign or a sign that I need to sharpen up my vocabulary, like, yesterday), and I love to write.
I've loved it for as long as I can remember. That love began when I took Betsy Michaels' writing class in the fourth grade, when I learned words like "lackadaisical" and thought I'd become a novelist. It grew, albeit differently, when I began reporting about the arts for my high school's newspaper. It transformed in a way I didn't know was possible when I interned at The Dallas Morning News, where I wrote about a man who jumps rope every weekend in the middle of a major shopping center and an exonerated man who donated his money from the state to a friend opening a music school. It was there that I realized that journalistic articles are not at all limited to formulaic writing - that I could write stories in my own voice and make people feel things when they read them. That no day is the same. That I could tell stories that matter and feel happy to be doing it.
In my third year at USC, it's hard not to feel insecure. I haven't had the internships I'd imagined securing, and I definitely don't feel like an Annenberg superstar. But I'm also trying to keep an open mind. During my last two years in college, I want to figure out what makes me different from everyone else as a journalist. Is it my voice? My sense of humor? My hopefully impending digital skills? I'll take this time to learn, to think and to grow, and then I hope I'll be able to answer that question.