Magical Moments

When I was little, my mom would play the song 'I Will' by The Beatles as I danced around the kitchen trying to sing the words. 

"This is your song Lex," she would say, "I played this for you when you were in my belly hoping you would hear it, because I knew I loved you before I even met you."

At the time, I didn't register the weight of that statement, but as I grew older and my Beatles obsession and understanding of the lyrics flourished, I realized the unconditional love my Mother had for me, and it gave me the foundation to discover who I wanted to be. 

I spent my childhood trying every activity under the sun, but it was always art that I would fall back to because it let me express myself in a way that nothing else could. I wrote my own songs, filmed my own videos, and wrote stories in notebooks filled with the good, the bad, and the sarcastic until my fingers hurt. I learned how to knit and sew so I could make my own clothes and watched hours of So You Think You Can Dance to learn how because I always believed that was what music was meant for.

I developed a passion for photography and how a single snapshot can hold more than what the eye can see. I called these magical moments: a friend's laugh that is funnier than the joke itself, the exciting news you've been waiting all day to tell somebody, the nervous energy of doing something for the first time. They are the stories behind the pixels that shape our memories and go unspoken and uncaptured.

I had an itch for adventure that grew with me as I got older, and last summer when it came time to pick a place to study abroad, London was at the top of my list. The art, history, and fashion intrigued me, and spending the younger years of my life dressing up as a princess to have tea parties with my sister and our Beauty and the Beast tea set made it the clear choice. To me, it made sense because it was a place where I could continue to explore my art and be unapologetically myself, not to mention taking a few pictures on Abbey Road. 

It wasn't until I started telling people where I was studying that I realized the choice wasn't as clear to everyone else as it was to me. I had always kept my artistic side to myself, especially in college because it was the one thing that was 100% mine at a school living in a house of 120 girls who shared everything. When my friends started asking me to explain why I chose London, and I saw the surprise on their faces when I told them all the things I'm passionate about, I realized that I had been hiding so much of who I was for so long. I wanted to change that, but when they would ask me to show them my work I would freeze. I had been keeping it to myself for so long that it became challenging to open up to people. I spent all semester slowly getting comfortable with expressing my creativity more openly, and when the application came out to be an IES Correspondant, I knew it was the perfect way to do that.

The best piece of advice I received about going abroad was, "don't tell people who you are, show them." I want this blog to be a place to share my adventures through the things that inspire me the most, and I'm excited to be able to do that in just a few short days! So let's begin...

These are my magical moments, the snapshots of my life that I have taken or edited that motivate me as I prepare for the adventure of a lifetime. I hope they can do the same for you.

Creatively yours,

-Lex <3