How Pinterest changed my life.
Is that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard or what? (Please don’t answer that).
The thing is, it’s entirely true.
**Schmalz alert: this post is overly cheezeball. You have been warned.
When I graduated college with my brand new photography degree, I had every intention of landing an awesome internship, perfecting my craft, and living a fabulously creative life of portraiture and Art with a capital A.
But I suffer from persistent migraines, which had steadily worsened while I was a student and became truly chronic after graduation. By chronic, I mean 15-20 migraines per month. I know, that’s a scary number. Nothing sucks away your creativity or ambition like searing pain and the anxiety that you’re going to lose your job because you get sick so often.
I spent the next three years or so bouncing from crappy job to crappier job, visiting a plethora of doctors, and feeling like my brain and every creative cell were rotting inside my skull. I don’t think I picked up my camera once in that time; I could barely catch my breath.
And then came Pinterest.
The biggest thing the migraines took from me was inspiration—not just feeling it, but even the ability to seek it out. I struggled so much just to get up in the mornings, there was no chance to get to art shows or befriend other creatives.
But with Pinterest, just like that, I suddenly had endless inspiring images at my fingertips. Photography, art, fashion—anything I could want to look at. Pinning is effortless, and easy to do in the little “well” time I had. I felt my world enlarging a bit, and my brain waking up.
It’s no coincidence that my migraines started to improve when creativity resurfaced in my life. (The Botox helped too. Less migraines and a wrinkle-free forehead? Yes, please!)
I pinned for about a year, ravenously sifting through the boundless sea of craft projects, travel destinations, and life hacks, and absorbing that which in some way inspired me.
Then one morning I woke up, and I felt like making. It was as though that year of pinning had been unforeseen research, stuffing my brain with slowly percolating ideas which all of a sudden burst out in a creative impulse to make…a pom-pom bookmark.
Hey, we all have to start somewhere.
Just two months after making this first little craft project, I started Jade and Fern.
So you see, Pinterest really did change my life. It gave me access to inspiration in a time when I lived in a creative vacuum. And it helped me make the leap from “I could make that” to “I did make that.”
Do you use Pinterest? What has your experience been with this often controversial platform? Has Pinterest changed any aspect of your life? I would love to hear your thoughts!
Enough of this cheesiness, I’m off to pin all the things do more research.
