MY WORLD OF MAKE BELIEVE

On June 19, 1994 my mother gifted me a colorful book entitled A Creative Companion: How to Free Your Creative Spirit. She stumbled across it in a gift shop at the San Francisco airport on her way to Hawaii and thought of me. I was 15 years old at the time and had been drawing outside the lines for my entire life. I found writing in Kindergarten and the characters quickly became part of my life as did a flare for the dramatic and eccentric. I was the girl whose arrival everyone awaited in fourth grade because I often had different colored socks on. And while I didn't mind being me, I did sometimes feel like the girl that drew purple tree trunks while everyone else fought over the brown crayons.

Then came SARK and her book and suddenly, I was ok just as I was. I knew I would be one crazy and creative adult and that I would never conform and be like everyone else. SARK made the juicy adult life that I dreamed of a reality and even more so I began to really love that my skies were sometimes rainbow colored and that my friends referred to me as Punky Brewster.

Here I am now, almost 30 and having grown up with SARK. I have an eight year old daughter that has fully embraced her own creative living. We talk to fairies and decorate the pictures in our home with flowery head wreaths instead of frames. We paint on our walls and make murals to hang on the ceiling and put glow in the dark stars all over our rooms. She too will grow up loving herself for her awesome imagination and someday she will be a wonderfully creative woman, she has even recently started to write. We need those that break the mold because they are where art and literature and music comes from.

I continue to write because I cannot go for long before I get that passion of expression tingling inside me, when the paper in front of me is thirsty and only the sweetness of a juicy pen can quench it and rehydrate my soul.

I'm so thankful that SARK lives her life true to who she is because her writing has helped me live true to who I am in the very best and colorful ways possible.