By Cheryl Yee, staff writer
“Finding inspiration” can sound difficult and oftentimes tedious. How do you find something that’s intangible? I think people should say “go feel some inspiration” because we all have the capacity to feel. I feel inspiration watching the people in my life, observing objects around me, and seeing people just live and do normal human things. For these following illustrations of my inspirations, I didn’t go looking for them. I just noticed how something felt when I laid my eyes on it. By letting go of the pressure to find inspiration, inspiration found me.
This is my seven-year-old cousin. In this drawing, he is reading the name of a role during a game he made—“Real Life Among Us,” which was the most hilarious game ever because of his excitement and my family’s half-heartedness. But besides being passionate about his games, my cousin inspires me through his kindness and willingness to learn. He reminds me that it’s OK to not know things, that you can always ask.
My grandma makes the best Chinese dishes and baked goods. Here, she is making cheesy bread with shredded dried pork filling, which got gobbled up in a few days. In Chinese culture, making food to share with others is a way of building friendships and starting conversations. But often, Chinese food has been westernized, stripped of its authenticity and uniqueness. My PoPo (grandma in Cantonese) reminds me, despite never seeing my homeland, to always remember my roots.
What is this, you may ask? This is Cardii, my invaluable stop motion animation phone holder that I fashioned out of a cardboard box. Now, I don’t have to worry about creating shaky stop motions because Cardii has got it covered! Making this made me realize that creating useful things requires me to just use the things I have around me—that sometimes, I have to visualize something differently in order to get at what I want.
Listening to Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days for the first time transcended me to another dimension, one that moves slower and is more introspective. Living in this fast-moving world has gradually made me feel like a robot that follows a routine everyday. Mac’s playful riffs, and velvety voice inspires me to just slow down and live life, to take care of myself first.
The pepper flakes of the sky. The sleek, black, minuscule-from-a-distance crows. Every time I walk at Twin Peaks, I see these crows ride the wind like pepper flakes dispersed in a salt mound. Small as they are, these crows reassure me that no matter how insignificant I may feel, I can take the reigns, ride the wind.
“Why would we deny the world our beauty?” Alok Vaid-Menon will forever be my idol. Catapulted into a heteronormative, white, gender-binary planet, Alok has not only accepted themselves but used their power to champion for trans and non-binary people of color. Living in a world that tells people to be themselves but only to an extent, that limits people’s true colors, Alok exudes their colors with confidence. And that inspires me to show my colors too.
Every time my mom gets an orchid, it dies quicker than the other plants. Its beauty only lasts a grading period at most. But this particular orchid struck me because it had a bud growing right next to a pair of shriveled-up flowers. And this reminded me that what dies can always be carried over into the next generation. We live in a continuum of life and death. And I want to take advantage of the continuum so that when I die, my life has inspired another generation to chase change.
