My 2018 - This is my hobby: Painting Colors to Black and White Characters

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Shannon who loved drawing, painting, just making things bright and colorful. She doesn't really talk much and would usually allot her spare time for that (just creating art), and on idle times at classes, she would start doodling randomly - drawing the backs of her classmates or caricatures of them occasionally. It has always been her hobby ever since she was a kid, she wasn't the best at it, but it was one of the things she knew she loved doing. However, once she reached college, she experienced one of the most trying times of her life. And without meaning to, all those drawings, those paintings of colorful things started to lose its color. The once cute characters she was drawing started to become depictions of characters in despair - either hanging themselves or just being someone who wants to be saved from the pits of misery. The usual bright palettes she loved touching seemingly remain untouched and the dark ones became the object of her affection.

What once was a colorful hobby lost the colors it was meant to give out originally, and she felt stuck. All those coloring materials set aside, art materials left to be filled with dust, white papers turned to yellow; she had a hard time expressing herself. And she can't continue doing so because she'll just end up doing more of those melancholic works. It became too much for her and just added up to those unwanted feelings. It was also becoming noticeable in the family that she was getting into an unwanted state, and continuing to do her art would make her true feelings more apparent.

Without any other means of self-expression and not really wanting to talk to anyone, she just found herself scribbling one time. She reached for those blank papers, she got a pen, and she scribbled mindlessly - empty words, short phrases, sometimes just random lines being made. With no particular sense of what she was doing, it went on and on, she just kept on scribbling those meaningless words.

Eventually, she noticed that those random words she would write down gradually flourished into more coherent statements that helped her express what she truly felt. With that, she felt like she had been reborn, had a new life, and a new object of her affection that she will surely fall deeply in love with - writing.

The road to self-expression wasn't really easy. She still wanted to keep on writing without giving away too much, she was still reserved with her own thoughts because it wasn't what she was used to. She was used to just drawing things and not having to say something about it. She was used to just mixing colors without having to think about why they were that way. Talking about things out in the open seemed to be too overwhelming for her. But she still wanted it, she felt like it was an art form more suitable for her because she lost her own color, she didn't want to deal with those dark or bright colors anymore and wanted to settle for the black and whites.

At first, it was just her own thoughts she started writing down, like what she was feeling at the moment, just little thoughts about random things she's stumbling upon on certain days. It served as a resort for her to vent out her frustrations, her deepest thoughts. She then realized how it really felt liberating. As in this world where she didn't feel like she has a loud voice (both literally and figuratively), writing became her voice. It helped her voice out the things she has a hard time saying out loud. It helped her not to seem dumb in this world where one of the basis of intelligence is your ability to speak confidently in front of a crowd. Those black and white characters helped her verbalize her thoughts when she doesn't really want to be in front of an audience.

After a while, she saw how it was a meaningful art form. How writing helps you paint colors into otherwise seemingly black and white characters. How when you add more details and articulation, it helps in better understanding the whole picture, it helps in letting people have a more vivid imagination of what you're trying to convey. How as the story goes a lot of things can still happen, either positive or negative - which is not only applicable to fiction but also with real-life events.

Once she saw how writing was able to fill the imagination in a different magnitude, she became more into it, she fell deeper into it.

Although not in a professional level, she kept on writing. She started having a lot of ideas for stories, of alternate realities she can create which can serve as some sort of escape from the harsh realities of the universe, of worlds where she can know what might happen, where she can make the world a better place, where people can be nicer and where they can live in a utopia.

In a way, writing became her escape, it gave her an avenue of getting into a different persona, of trying to think from the point of view of another person. Although there may be a little touch of her own personality injected into the characters she's making, but once she started creating the character, she realized, it's the one who's speaking now and not her. It's as if playing the role of another person she can't and will never be. It felt like a breath of fresh air and yet another liberating experience she got from writing.

At present, most of those story ideas are just lying in the comforts of her laptop. Most have remain untouched whereas a special few have already gotten a head start. Even when it may still take a while before she'll have those happily ever after's with her stories as she's also struggling with the day to day happenings in real life, writing has become a way to relieve stress, it helped her imagine and create, it helped her let our her inner thoughts.