This is the second of 12 weeks I’ll be participating in a book blogging group for 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women. The secret this week is Honoring Your Inspirations and the question is: What have you always loved? What inspires you? Catches your eye? Makes your heart sing?

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I have always loved words. The way they sound when they’re put together. Everything they can mean. What they can imply. How they can tell a story. How a subtle tone can change their impact. The way they make you feel when someone says just the right ones. The spoken word, the written word, the interpreted word, the visual word. The words that never make it out of our heads. They fascinate me.

In elementary school, it was more about writing them than reading them. And writing a lot of them. In second grade, I remember using the special gray recycled paper that had large rows made of solid lines on top and bottom and a dotted line in the middle. We were writing about being good citizens, or something equally boring, and I remember having to take all my pages into the hallway and line them up on the floor so I could see my whole story as I wrote because they wouldn’t all fit on my desk anymore. And at some point I remember it just being about the person who wrote the most pages and was not going to give up until it was me. This is probably where I got the bump on my ring finger that has never gone away — a bump from the friction of pencil against skin.

During high school yearbook, we went to workshops, conventions and camps across the country where I learned about reading good words — from magazines, books, newspapers and articles that won Pulitzer Prizes. We’d listen to our teachers read and I could feel the joy stir in me, even if the words weren’t pleasant or positive (we read plenty of heart wrenching features from the St. Petersburg Times, and one from Esquire was about rape, but we weren’t allowed to hear the end of that one).

We read so many examples of quality writing to feel how it was structured, what questions the writers answered, the rhythm the words had. After we heard examples, we’d write for 15 minutes (The Artist’s Way feels very similar to me in this way. Just write three pages. Doesn’t matter what about. Doesn’t matter if you can’t think of anything to write about; just keep your hand moving the entire time).

The kicker was that we read our journaling aloud to the class. No one was allowed to say anything once someone was done — you just clapped. This was completely voluntary and I’d avoided it. I could write well past the 15 minute timer, but speaking the words out loud — my words out loud — was a different game. But at the last class, I figured I had to get at least one time in. So I read my journaling to the class. And I didn’t die. And no one made funny faces or whispered behind my back. When I conferenced with one of my instructors later, he reread my story and said, in his disarming Southern accent, “Daaaang, girl! You can write.”

And with those four small words from a very amazing man, I wasn’t as scared to share that part of myself any more.

I still battled that fear in college, actually switching my major from News & Information to Public Relations because I didn’t want to take a reporting class and have the whole university reading my stories (not to mention that I’d have to write three a week!). Two months before graduation, I finally acknowledged that I hated public relations and decided to stick around for summer school and another semester to take the News & Information classes I’d tried so hard to avoid. I realized I could write for the magazine instead of the newspaper, a tone and structure that was more suited to me. During that same semester, I copy edited for the newspaper and website two nights a week and designed the paper two more nights.

I don’t know how I managed it all, but it forced me to do all the things I’d been interested at once. I researched and interviewed people and studied the English language and attended management meetings and had piles of inspirational designs stacked all over my bedroom and the newsroom and attempted to memorize the New York Times’ Week in Review section in preparation for a weekly quiz and subsisted on coffee. This is how I learned that I didn’t have to pick one thing. One career. One passion. One interest. One way.

I’m reminding myself of that lesson again now. I design for a magazine. I contribute to This Ordinary Day. I started this website. I want to design stationery, cards and prints. I want to write books. I find inspiration for all these things from color and honesty and the way letters on a card can be perfectly tucked into each other like a hug and the feeling you get from a really good e-mail from a close friend that you’ve been eagerly waiting for. I’m inspired by warm chocolate chip cookies and a flavorful glass of red wine and seeing snowflakes float up instead of fall down. I’m inspired by sunshine and breezes and mistakes and irony and humor and photography and home-cooked meals and handmade crafts. I’m inspired by courage and confusion, frailty and humility and emotion. By the bravery it takes to be who you are meant to be. I’m inspired by triple espressos and the finish line of a race in Central Park and experiments.

Sometimes everything I’m interested in and inspired by feels overwhelming — because I want to understand it and learn to do it myself (well, not make sunshine and breezes, but the other stuff) — and I feel like I can’t have it all… the regular job, the card company, the leisurely day spent cuddled in bed with notebooks and pens and coffee, losing time while I write; an afternoon of endless flickr faving; a lazy sunday spreading out my paints and playing.

And then I remind myself that I don’t have to make any decisions now. That these things aren’t mutually exclusive. If I really want to do them all, I will find a way. I’m not sure how, and the idea of giving up a steady paycheck, health insurance, a flexible health care spending account, tuition reimbursement and stability freaks me the hell out. But we can’t really choose the things we love — they sort of choose us. So I’m going to embrace what I love now and stay open to what I’ll come to love later.