By Twyla Liden 

As soon as I hear the phrase ”We are going to draw!” my normal reaction is to cry, run away and then cry some more. That changed on Thursday after our second session of life drawing with Ian. I am slowly but surely getting comfortable with being outside of my comfort zone. I am starting to appreciate my tripping and stumbling when it comes to master the different briefs and tasks we are handed at SCA. I come up with an idea I think is great, talk to a mentor, they say it is crap and they push me to rethink and I come up with something better. I understand we have not even started to scratch the surface of the tough and hard work yet but coming to this realization that I truly NEED to fail and be crap to be able to be good is making the future look pretty damn nice. Being less and less afraid to fail is going to open up so many opportunities to go in directions that were not visible to me before. Now do not get me wrong I have not come to some sort of zen state where everything is daisies and roses but I do feel that I have taken one small step in the right direction to become more open and curious in my creative thinking. If that happened in the first three weeks I can not wait to see what the coming year beholds.

My original plan to come to London did actually not include SCA. My flight was supposed to leave the 30th of September. I was supposed to work in a shop or in a café or in some other brain-numbing place where my day would consist of being fake nice to people feeling obliged to be fake nice back. Obviously, that is not what happened. I am now in an environment that is letting me explore every creative thought I have. It encourages me to put value in all my ideas and explore them in every way. I no longer come home feeling frustrated because my body is exhausted from serving ungrateful tourists all day and not having the physical energy to attend to my very active brain. Nowadays it is the other way around. My brain has finally awakened from the trenches of the catering business and I feel all the small pockets of energy being utilized for their purpose.

The more projects I go through and start, the more I want to do. I want to see where my mind will go and what ideas will grow from all the different tasks we are assigned. I still have a lot of work to do when it comes to creating outrageous and unexpected ideas. Considering all the crazy stuff we have been up to during this short period of time I am not too concerned that my mind won’t catch up to the weird paths of thinking here amongst my peers and mentors.