In the earlier days of my youth, I lived and breathed with an influence of creativity, which was encouraged by my parents. I was fortunate to have received so much support from them as I have grown up and have attended college.

My mother is a professional artist who has believed that since her creativity was stifled when she was young, that she would raise her children with encouragements in following their dreams. She is the person who taught me how to draw, the person who helped me fall in love with storytelling and reading, and most of all, the person who gave me as much drive as I do today in following my dreams.

My father is also a creative mind, but in a logical sense. He is a natural talent with math and in any form of craftsmanship. His hands are rough and calloused from mechanical work, engineering, and inventing products with his bare hands. He is the man that taught me to not be afraid to speak, to be a leader, and to manage my dreams with a taste of reality while still aspiring to follow them. He is also a person who was a large influence in making me who I am today.

My younger sister and brother helped me learn to cooperate with others as well as how to lead with a loving heart. I wrote stories with my sister and learned to wrestle and roughhouse with my little brother. They both also were a large role in making me who I am today.

I grew up southwest from Seattle in a town called Port Orchard. It’s a small place not too far from a sandy beach or some of the great hiking trails in the Cascade Mountain Range. This place will always be considered home. The little house outside of the city limits, buried in between acres and acres of forests, drove much of my inspiration for my writing and built my faith in God to what it is today.

Thanks to my parents, my childhood was heavily literature and outdoor-based. I spent my days in the summer trampling through a forest I created worlds from, and my evenings buried in books such as “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

As for my faith, I grew up going to the same church for most of my childhood. My father would spend daddy-daughter dates located in Red Robin talking with me about how to be a woman of Christ at a very young age. He treated me like he would an adult and allowed me to ask any questions I could think of.

My early childhood was very rich and happy.

I never particularly enjoyed school prior to college. In middle school, I found myself more frustrated than ever with all the immaturity of my classmates. I also grew impatient with the subjects I was supposed to be learning. All I wanted to do was write and read stories. I had dreams of being an adolescent author and aspired to eventually have something published. Knowing at least an idea of the fact that the process was going to be a lot of work, I waited and built material I thought would be worth publishing someday while I was supposed to be focusing on the teacher speaking in the class.

My love for English actually had decreased dramatically when entering high school. The essays I was forced to write and the books I had no choice but to read were emotionally draining, frustrating, and discouraging. Compared to the A-plus students in the class who were always eager to speak, to write and read and complete their assignments, I was nobody. I felt like my books and poetry would never match the high expectations of the teachers and would be nothing more than extra credit work should I dare to suck up to the teachers to ask about it.

Despite this discouragement, I finished my first novel in August 2014, using creative writing as a release from stress and from the pressures of early to mid-teenage years. By the time I turned fifteen, I stopped going to my home church. I didn’t go to church at all, nor did I feel the need to. I had lost my best friend in a car accident and my cousin to suicide within a couple of months of each other. My best friend was one of the sweetest, God-loving people that everyone just knew would make a mark on the entire world. And God himself shut off the light that shone in her eyes, cut the thread of life that held her frame together. Losing her shattered me more than the cousin I barely knew, let alone remembered. All I remember now is being angry at him for making the rest of my family suffer for his actions.

It was when I completed my sophomore year of high school that I decided to attend college the next year to pursue my Associate’s Degree. High school in general not only didn’t suit me but seeing that I had an opportunity to obtain a degree at the same time as a diploma, I was eager to go. This means that what would have been my junior year of high school was also my freshman year of college.

By the time I turned sixteen, I could have considered myself as someone who almost entirely walked away from their faith. However, after the summer of that year, something in me changed. I started attending a college bible study, was being treated like an adult in the college I attended (to the point where I lied about my age on a few occasions, and where all my friends thought I’d graduated high school already), and felt happier with myself—I’d gained a sort of independence from starting to attend Olympic College that I had craved for years.

The bible study connected me to Christians in a way that I had never experienced before. Prior to leaving my home church when I was younger, despite spending about fourteen years of my life there, the church had grown too large to fit me or my family. It didn’t matter that my father founded the men’s ministry or that my mother and my siblings and I volunteered and helped set up the church camps for the summer. We had all dedicated hours of our time helping build the church, but when it came to the average Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights, each of us were excluded from the physical groups of people encircled throughout the building—

huddled together and whispering the latest gossip just after hearing the message.

This bible study made me feel welcomed in a gospel-based environment. The message itself was awe-inspiring and so powerful I could not help but weep. I attended every week since until I moved to Seattle, and after hearing the message each week, I was not only refilled from an emptied state, but inspired to evangelize, to create the best version of myself, and to follow the Lord with my heart fully involved.

After graduating high school with an Associate’s degree, I transferred to Seattle Pacific University with ninety credits under my belt. Barely eighteen, I still held on to my dreams in becoming an author and decided to pursue a degree in Creative Writing to become the best writer that I could be.

My story starting at the age of eighteen is not typical. Only two years later, I am graduating with the degree I have, in a way, always dreamed about attaining. Most people enter college either not knowing what they want to do with their lives or they end up changing their majors a few times. In some way, I feel that I have always known what I wanted, and thanks to the encouragement of my parents, I have been motivated enough to pursue my dreams. Unfortunately, due to this short experience at a university, I believe that I have missed out on learning opportunities and experiences that every other college students have the privilege of experiencing. Yes, I leave college with half the debt of the average undergraduate, but I also leave with half the experiences—half the late night snacking and cramming for finals, half the time doing last minute, rebellious, and stupid things college kids do… you get the idea. I will not be leaving school with the same education as other English students by any means.

While I was attending Olympic College as a full-time student, I found the classes entertaining and rewarding. I fell in love with literature again and craved to learn more of its history and how to write with the skill of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.

Transferring to a university with my level of credits meant that I had to take on upper-division level credits right away to graduate within two years. This means that I had to quickly adjust from taking community college credits to full-blown, major specific university credits. My GPA plummeted after that, and I missed out on educational opportunities that freshmen level university classes had to offer and had to teach myself almost everything I know now about how to write a quality upper-division essay that was taught to my English major classmates.

However, what I did manage to pick up from my short two years attending Seattle Pacific University was quite valuable. I learned how to write short stories. I developed my writing style after years of being in a funk from writing so many academic essays. I met my current boyfriend. I grew in my faith with God like never before. I became who I am today.

During my first year at SPU, at the end of fall quarter, Nick asked me out on a date after months of crushing on me, so he claims. We’d spent a whole night studying together in the Hill Hall movie lounge, gone to church and tried to keep each other awake, and shared many laughs within the last forty-eight hours. It took me an entire night of sleep and another day to process that he wasn’t just saying things because he was lacking of sleep. Our first date was unlike any other I’ve been on in my short life. I remember it almost as if it happened yesterday.

Within the last year and a half of dating him, my relationship with myself has improved, and I have grown into a version of myself I could say that I’m prouder of and could not have become without him. His logical mind balances out my creative one. He balances me out, and I believe I do the same for him. Although I like to wander and consider myself very independent, I am anchored and find stability in him. He has helped me learn to trust people again, and continues to help me to learn to lean on the Lord during struggles. He is patient, and kind, and loving not just to me, but to everyone he meets. He loves others fully and without hesitation. I could not be who I am today without him.

Looking back and reading my writing prior to even graduating from Olympic College, I’ve noticed that it either “tells” too much or the main character gets too lost in their thoughts. Reflecting on what my first novel was like, I remember that the plot was not as creative as it could have been. However, the characters were wild and full of imagination, but still demanding to be completed. My main character grew up along with me, but she was not as complex as she could have been. The story grew as I grew, but it is something that I will probably leave just as it is because not only do I not find it good enough to rewrite and send in a manuscript, part of me wants to leave it as it is. Now, my stories are not necessarily as wild as they were when I was younger, but I believe that they have become more mature and more descriptive in diction.

Just recently, I rewrote a short story that was created originally in middle school. Not only has my level of life experience enriched the writing to the point where it is more realistic, my writing style has matured to the point where I know how to control how I want my audience to react, how to put my intentions and ideas onto paper effectively, and how to use the sounds of the words I use themselves to echo the meaning of the entire writing. I have become much more like the writer I want to be: abstract, poetic, and a wordsmith in every way. Until this short story was rewritten, I felt in a slump as to what to do with a short story to make it something that feels poetic but conveys conciseness as well where needed.This is something I continue to work on, but believe that I have dramatically improved on thanks to this school and the creative writing program.

I wish that more workshop classes existed, or that literature classes required separate prompts for creative writing majors than literature majors. I find essay writing important, but feel like I should have spent more time writing stories than cramming for essays. The fiction and poetry workshops have helped me develop into the writer I am today. The literature classes helped me learn the history of writing and cultures, but I would have loved to write creative responses for each class rather than be restricted in following an essay prompt.

Through the poetry workshops with Professor Maier, I learned not only how to write poetry that was clear and focused on the language rather than simply the sounds of the words, I learned how to write more poetic fiction as well. In taking the fiction workshops with Professor Overstreet and Wolfe, I found encouragement in writing short stories again and gained inspiration to continue writing after college. The Imaginative Writing class I decided to take with Professor Anderson this quarter for extra credits helped me feel more confident in my skills to create work that I am proud of. That is not something I could feel about academic work. Not ever.

Thanks to the people I have met, especially my boyfriend, I have been encouraged to take leaps of faith, and to just go for what I desire without fear. Thanks to this, I have fallen even more in love with photography and started to pursue it professionally. I also decided last minute that I would raise money to study abroad this summer to complete my degree. This meant taking on extra work and to use my 20% in savings from prior jobs to save. I started taking on clients for photography and for writing, and managed to raise about two thousand dollars specifically for the trip on top of working toward earning money to pay off tuition through tutoring and childcare, which is where 70% of my earnings have gone.

I am looking forward to studying abroad in Rome this summer, where I can experience the Italian culture and hopefully start my second novel. Following this trip, I hope to find immediate work in Seattle to pay off bills.

Being a graduate of a university is not normal by any standards. I hope that it will help me face the world as I embrace it with open arms.