I received my acceptance package from MICA in the mail on Saturday.  Despite my uncertainty about what I'd like to do after my AmeriCorps*VISTA year ends on June 24th, being accepted into a supposedly very competitive graduate program is a validating experience.  My scholarship letter cites my "outstanding qualifications" and "superior achievement in visual arts."  I may be hard on myself much of the time, but these words do manage to make me feel like perhaps the struggle of my undergraduate years and the hard work I have put in afterward was good for something.

Incidentally, my entire visual art portfolio was photography even though I concentrated in painting for my BFA.  Once again I am reminded of the intense struggle I felt every day in the painting studio.  I continually felt unable to live up to my professors' expectations and unable to compete with my peers.  How much of this came from my own high standards for myself I will never know, but I do think one professor in particular made me realize painting was not my true calling.  He was passionate, maybe even maniacal, about painting and favored students who felt -- or at least expressed themselves -- similarly.  He must have seen some sort of potential in me or he never would have tried to push me so hard, but I always ended up feeling like he was trying to wrench something out of me that just wasn't there.

In the end, I have realized (or rediscovered, since I was hell-bent on becoming a professional musician between fourth and tenth grade) that I just do not think visually.  It is why I cannot draw objects from memory and struggle to draw from a subject sitting in front of me.  It is why I painted more for the experience of the paint than I did for the images.  Maybe it is even why I often get lost, unable to visualize a map in my head.  Certainly it is why I found 4 Weeks to an Organized Life With AD/HD to be so unhelpful.

But if I'm not a visual thinker, why this continued interest in the visual arts?  Why am I still drawn to photography, and why did I submit a portfolio to a visual arts graduate program?

I really think photography allows me freedom from my inability to visualize.  I am at home behind the viewfinder because for once, my image has been laid out before me in perfect detail.  I can adjust angles and depth of field, work little by little until I have the frozen image that explains the scene exactly as I saw and felt it.  There is no other way to preserve it.  I adore photographs because they preserve a thought, a memory in a way my mind usually cannot. 

While I can always remember the tone of a voice that has called my name, photographs allow me to look into the eyes of someone I have lost.  They also evoke the spirit of a scene as I felt it at the moment I released the shutter.  While I dream of taking a sketchpad, india ink, and brushes along on an upcoming trip to Europe, I know I shouldn't even bother.  I should buy a special journal and an extra memory card.  I should take hundreds, even thousands of photographs.  I should write out all the words in my head while I'm sitting outside a cafe in Venice because this is how I will capture it.

As I continue to explore who I am, not who I convince myself to be, I am learning all over again that I think in music and eloquent words, but I see through my photographs.