Through The Eye Of My iPhone

For the last year I genuinely had been in a writing slump, and it gets really discouraging when you don't feel like you can open up your laptop. For me it's been either all or nothing. Personally I can crank out a essay super fast, because writing for me has always come naturally. In fact in high school, one of our English class options we could do was creative writing in lieu of a normal English Lit class.

My other favorite was Greek Mythology, both classes really stirred up my writing and motivated me to pursue creative writing later on in life. However I feel like when you become an adult, alot of that stiffles. Bills, kids, just everything gets in the way or becomes an excuse to not sit down and just write. At one point it was an escape for me, and then it felt like a chore. Personally I just don't want to write something if it isn't coming from the heart. So I took a year off of Vocal to really reflect on what I wanted in life, and personally it's something I regret.

Regret in the sense that I actually loved doing the challenges and had a prompt to run off. It reminded me of being in High School all over again, and my English teacher would give us prompts and essentially spark that creativity. But I became really burnt out just due to my own personal mental health, but also raising two kiddos on the autism spectrum as a single parent. It was a lot. I basically went through a period where I just cut things out to the point where my life was essentially bare bones and running on fumes.

After sitting in a therapy session one day, I realized that me cutting out creative writing actually was harming more than helping. Because it was an outlet for me to channel and talk about what was going on in my world. Writing in itself is actually extremely therapuetic when you look at it from a journaling stand point. Because it gives a voice and helps to channel your thoughts into something constructive. It's one of the top 10 recommendations that's given when going through healing and post recovery from trauma.

So I got with my director at the Creative Arts therapy program for veterans at the VA recently, and explained this dilema I was feeling about everything. And she actually challenged me this year to do something pretty big that I wasn't really comfortable with. But I'm trusting her creative flow here. Not to mention everything I can do on here, I can cross use for multiple upcoming events happening in 2025.

At the VA every year there's a Creative Arts Competition, where veterans at the VA all over the country can submit creative projects like photography, art paintings, creative writing etc. If you place you can get selected to go to Nationals and be flown to whatever VA is hosting in their state to represent. There's also a huge talent show competition for singing etc. Personally I'm not super musically inclined anymore like I once was in my show choir days. But something I am actually really proud of is my photography!

I don't personally own a physical camera, I would love one. But the one I want is a nature photography camera, and personally the specific lense is close to $10,000 brand new. So it's something that I want to save for later on. So once I got into this photography group, they just encouraged me to use my iPhone for starting out! Eventually I was coming to group weekly, and they were so confused on how specific photos were looking the way they were edited! Just because the quality was amazing.

I honestly just went on YouTube and learned how to really get the full experience out of using my iPhone camera and haven't looked back since. Our iPhones are like $1200 brand new, and they have the best camera features in my opinion. But week after week I would show up with photos and they were all just shocked how they would just come from my phone!

Eventually the director challenged me to do a couple of things. I am to submit 1 black and white photo, one color photo, and 1 creative writing essay into the competition for this summer! Which intern got me thinking, I want to challenge myself here to cocreate my own personal photography into my writing. I never had a place where I could actively combine both hobbies before! It was always a separate thing. But here on Vocal I can do both!

I personally want to start contributing alot more in the coming weeks and months as a travel blog here on Vocal in the Wander category. Consider me a "Travel Contributor" focusing on adventures and exploration here in the Pacific Northwest. I'm basically up near the Canadian border in a little town called Bellingham. What's amazing is it's a town people fly to as a half way point for activities like backcountry camping, hiking etc. I'm essentially 8 hours away from Forks, WA where the Twilight franchise was inspired. 2 hours away from Mount Baker. Olympic National Park, Seattle, like SO MANY THINGS.

My goal is to share travel tips and ideas of what to do if you were ever considering coming to the PNW. Especially if you have special needs kids, and you wonder Can I go hiking with special needs kids? How can I camp with small kids? What are the most family friendly options for travel? My first ever trip I took alone as a single mom of two kids with autism was to the Grand Canyon. Impromptu. Alone. That trip was the spark of me getting back out into the world after my divorce. So I hope to show and educate others how to feel confident in doing something like this!

Plus I would like to also challenge myself to submit multiple entries to each competition. Even if it's not my strong suit, I want to expand and get better in my own personal writing style. Really honing in on my voice, learning to use more expressive language and vocabulary! My writing muscle is definitely a little weak but it will get stronger in time!

And finally I want to potentially work on only using my photography in the challenges when entering into a competition. I want to grow my portfolio, so if there's a category outside of my normal prompt of travel like horror, or romance. I want to stimulate that creative side of my brain to capture original photos so my stories here on Vocal are completely unique to me and my world!

So that's my goal for 2025, at least in the writing department of life. I think that this is an awesome starting point for me right now, and I am happy with where things are heading! If you have a place here in the Pacific Northwest you want me to write about, or review please let me know.

What is your favorite place you have been? Let me know in the comments below! And if you want more travel type content in your feed, feel free to subscribe! I hope some day I can build a little community on here of people who love to travel and explore as much as we do! Cheers!

-Kayla