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?

• • •

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.

This is the first of 12 weeks I’ll be participating in a book blogging group for 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women. The secret this week is acknowledging your creative self and the question is: Where are you on the journey to your creative self?

• • •

My creative self is still in its infancy stage. It was only last year when I discovered blogs; the most influential were women writing about their creative journeys and struggles, about finding the strength to pursue their dreams and abandon security and the known. They were honest and raw and inspiring. It wasn’t until I saw these other women succeeding outside the standard work day and job description that the idea of doing it myself became not only an option in my life, but a feasible goal.

I’m finally allowing myself to test the waters of activities I’m interested in instead of thinking that I won’t be good at them or that it’s a waste of money. Thanks to my employer’s tuition reimbursement program, I took a typography class during the summer and a letterpress class during the fall. While I was on vacation in Portland, I attended a mixed media class at Art & Soul even though I hadn’t touched paint since elementary school.

Grasping that it’s OK to fail is something that I’m still working on — trying to be comfortable with things not going as planned. Because at least that means that you tried something new, something unknown and out of your comfort zone.

My creative self is working on becoming less scared — of putting my works, my designs, my life out into the world, unsure of how they’ll be received. I still struggle with writing what feels authentic versus writing what I want people to read or think about me. This website still doesn’t have an About me section because I’m not sure what parts of myself I want to represent, how much of myself I want to share, what is even relevant to people who’d read it.

2008 was a momentous year in terms of acknowledging that I am worthy and competent enough to pursue my interests in writing and design, and that I’m strong enough to handle whatever challenges come my way during the journey. I’d like 2009 to see more exploration of them. Tangible results, not just thinking. I’m in the middle of The Artist’s Way. I started Project 365. I have compiled more writing prompts than I know what to do with. Now I just have to keep up with them.

Scheduling and finances permitting, I’m hoping to connect more with other creative souls this year, hopefully at BlogHer and Squam (though I’m still debating whether there are enough classes I want to take to warrant the cost, or if a trip abroad would be equally soul-stirring).

My creative self is gradually overcoming stage fright and working on feeling comfortable in the light. I do not yet know how I will make my creative dreams happen and sometimes that scares me, but I’m done letting them whisper unattended in the back of my mind. I want them to shout with joy.