A Blank Canvas

I've had a lot of self-realization moments this week and I decided to write my thoughts down here so I don't forget them but also because I need someone to be accountable to, even if it's just to the nobody that reads this blog. Most of it was inspiration from watching Incubus interviews. Brandon Boyd really is the greatest human being. Well not quite, but he's up there. Way up there. Anyways in elementary school (that's right, I'm going WAY back) I was always sort of an odd kid and I took pride in it. One time I tried to fit my head in my desk. I have no idea what I thought I would accomplish from that. But the point is that I thrived on the attention that I received from being the weird kid in the class. You all remember the kid, the one who would save his farts all day and then just let them rip all at once to get the most attention. Usually this kid grows out of it but for some reason it stuck with me. Possibly because other people always saw me as "that kid" and so I let them define me. Then I eventually went on my mission and left all the people who knew me. I left "that kid" back in Las Vegas and it was time for me to define myself. I struggled for two years and, in a way, am still struggling with who I am. I think that I allowed others to define me because it allowed me to think less about important matters. To just shift them to the back of my mind and forget about them. Which I later came to find out really hurt me from progressing. Now that I'm back from my mission and done with high school I have no choice but to focus on what I want to be. It's really overwhelming because how can you decide what you want to be when you don't know who you are? So now I'm in college stuck at this fork in the road and for the first time in my life I'm thinking about what makes me happy instead of what makes me forget about my problems. I enjoy art, music and photography but I know next to nothing about any. I'm in a 2D design class right now and it made me realize that what I've been creating in the past that I thought was art really has no meaning. Art is an expression and I was just making what I thought looked good but it had nothing to do with me. This is really what started the soul searching. If I'm going to create art, if I'm going to express myself I need to know who that is. From now on I'm promising myself to put thought into everything I do. To think beyond, "I like this" to "Why do I like this?". To question everything I think about and to start building myself. Right now my life is a blank canvas and it's time for me to start painting it.