Navigating Chaos through Creative Visualization

For several years I’ve felt that life tends to have a fair amount of arduous and inexplicable chaos. When I was a young child, I devised a coping mechanism to deal with it: creative visualization. Most thoughts in my head were transformed into physical representations. The emotions that were difficult to confront were turned into apparitions, and my greatest dreams were represented by complex but vivid images, much of which I describe to be a movie in my head. The context of my life is a screenplay that is acted out by my imagination, allowing me to visualize and make sense of events and concepts that are otherwise difficult to understand.

As I grew older, I delved into the many contours of the English language and used writing to convey and illustrate my thoughts through poetry, story writing, and other forms of creative writing. Not only that, my creative expression bled into my interpretation of science and mathematics. In the fifth grade, when my teacher assigned her class to write about our favorite things, instead of writing the typical paper descriptions of dogs, cats, horses, and video games, my mind vaulted into space where I explored black holes and dark matter. I interpreted the information I learned about astrophysics in great detail, and produced a paper I'm still proud of to this day.

In high school, I was tasked to write poetry in my creative writing class and submit my works to a local competition called the “Inland Empire Teen Poet Laureate”. I latched onto the challenge with prose describing my passions from flying to the environment. Lo, and behold, my creative ruminations earned me the designation of Poet Laureate finalist and Jane Block Teen Environmental Poet. The honors led to my work being officially published and brought me subsequent invitations and commissions to write more poetry and speak at formal events.