Awakenings

I would like to call myself a wannabe fashionista. There is something about fashion that really intrigues me. It is not simply the fact that I really enjoy putting outfits together and am obsessed with clothing, but I feel designing and making my own pieces of clothing allows me to materialize my creative energies. Reconciling color schemes and coordinating textures has been a hobby since I was very young.

My love affair with fashion began very early on. My mother was a seamstress when I was a young child. She made everything that could have possibly been sewn together in my house. From clothes to bedding covers, if it involved fabric and thread, my mother probably made it. The house was always filled with fabrics, sewing patterns, and sewing machines.

Hoping to follow in my mother’s footsteps and be able to create wonderful pieces, I decided at the age of seven that I would become a fashion designer when I grew up. After making plenty of childish sketches, I realized that perhaps, this was not my calling. Aside from lacking the artistic ability to actually create the all important sketch, I noticed as soon as I could put my innovative ideas on to paper, I’d be left at a loss for weeks at a time.

Then it happened. I was eight years old, in a literature class. The assignment was to write a fictional story with the overlaying theme of mystery. I took this idea and ran with it. The assignment was to write a 1 page story. My initial draft of the story ending up being about 3-5 pages long. Needless to say, I felt I found my new calling. Writing seemed to be a more reasonable and appropriate way to materialize my creative energies than fashion designing. Even at age eight, I had a significant about face.

Soon after that incident, I relished the creative writing opportunities in school. Though I especially enjoyed writing pieces of fiction, all writing opportunities were embraced; I even looked forward to writing analytic response pieces in the literature course. In a few short months, I felt I had found my calling for the rest of my life. Throughout the remainder of elementary and into middle school, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the writing assignments I was given. In high school, I took courses that were centered around writing, including honors English and journalism classes. In my junior and senior years I served my school newspaper as reporter and editor-in-chief respectively.

Though I have not completely abandoned my love of fashion (I still knit and create small items in my spare time), the about face showed me that although aspirations can change, our underlying love and interests can remain the same.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 11:45 am and is filed under