In the year 2000, I was a homeschooled twelve-year-old living just outside of Washington, D.C.
That year, I made my story universe, which I write in to this day.
In terms of authors, I was propelled by C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Madeline L’engle. The worldbuilding, the fantasy, the science fiction. The continuity of characters across a series (unlike Nancy Drew, they showed me you could focus on the side characters in later novels)… Those three authors showed me what could be done. They inspired me.
But more than those, it was a month of adventures at The Mall in D.C. that was the catalyst to my youthful creativity.
Homeschooling was an abrupt thing. My little brother and I had been in a private Catholic school until a bout of bullying endangered my brother’s life and broke my parents’ trust in the school we were enrolled in. So out we went, to the realm of black and white photocopied textbooks from some distant school that managed curriculum which we could devour at our own pace.
When dad got a job in Tennessee, mom decided to make the most of our proximity to the Washington, D.C. museums before we moved. So we bundled into the car in the pre-dawn hours, where mom would park at a mall so we could transfer to a bus. The bus would bring us to the metro station just by dawn, and we’d take the metro into D.C.
And every day, we’d spend touring a different museum. We saw history from so many angles, science in macro and micro. The planetarium and the birth of a universe one day. Extracting DNA from our own saliva in little glass test tubes the next.
This beat the usual school tour, those once-yearly ventures into any given venue. Getting to see every museum, participate in all their activities, it was really something. Aside from over a dozen Smithsonian museums, we also toured the White House, the FBI building, and even the Pentagon! After 9-11, that wouldn’t be as possible for most people.
When we landed in Tennessee, in a quiet town with less to do, the isolation spurred frustration which propelled creativity. And I developed my universe, similar to our own, but with its own differences which led to fantastical settings and aliens and so much more. I created the rules of my universe, which would be tested years later in university writing workshops. And with pride I could say – I made this, I started this, I developed this when I was twelve.
Recently, I tried touring a few museums in the Philippines. It was both a hopeful and sad thing. It showcased all of the variety of life that exists in this dear country, but none of the interactive activities that get kids to brain their own things from what they see and experience. The Philippine museums have a long ways to go.
With that in mind, my sincerest thanks to the castle-like structures of the Smithsonian and their universes of contents within for helping a younger me create something I could be proud of.
03 September 2022