Hello my sunshine!

"You've gotta live light enough to see the humor, and long enough to see some change" -Ani DiFranco

I'm Nicole, the creator of BeSunshine.  Welcome to the hub of my creativity and the outlet for passion for curiosity, investigation, and organization. I know, it seems eclectic and loosely connected at best, hence that thread of organization through it all. 

Truth is, we're all multifaceted and have diverse interests, passions, and concerns. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way. That makes us interesting, it makes us individuals. Everything we experience shapes who we are and how we navigate through the world. 

...so, here's BeSunshine

Be Sunshine was born out of need for an outlet for my passion for creativity.

BeSunshine is my outlet for creative exploration, for appreciating and being inspired by our beautiful, expansive, and complicated world. 

BeSunshine is a place for creativity, for reflection, for sensitivity, and for exploration.

Please, peruse the pages of BeSunshine, subscribe to the PeriodicalSunshine, and follow me on Instagram to stay up on the Sunshine Curiosities.

...my long and winding road

I was accepted to the Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) program through my public school district when I was in the fourth grade. My life became about expressing myself and exploring the world through the arts. I lived for dance, and I loved to paint. From then on, my classes through high school included a mix of traditional academics and CAPA classes. I expressed and understood my life through the words and works of my favorites artists, storytellers, poets, and musicians.

In college I really struggled to maintain that balance of arts and academics that I had become accustomed to, guess I got a little spoiled. I ended up taking 7 years, 3 colleges, and 8 attempted majors to complete my BA in Psychology (even then I graduated with two minor concentrations, as well, in Women & Gender Studies & Visual Arts). I'm all over the place because the connections between the subjects are what interest me. It's never about one thing, it's about how everything intersects and interacts. I was also just 1-2 classes short of the course requirements for a Political Science minor by the time I applied for graduation. But I had to draw the line somewhere! I needed to get out of college.

In my psychology I major I studied things like cognitive development, educational pedagogy, the neuroscience of art. I was fascinated by concepts like metacognition and mindfulness (from a positive psychology perspective). Mostly I loved to learn about the different areas (lobes) of the brain--their individual functions and the ways that they worked together to create our experiences and perceptions. Brains are so damn fascinating. I could go on for days about them...

When I finally made it to my alma mater, University of IL Springfield, I found a student worker position in the ITS Media Lab. Now up to this point, I'd never really call myself a "techie" person, but I knew how to use the basic programs and I could navigate myself around a search engine pretty well, so they hired me. I ended up learning a lot on this job, kept it for 3 years, probably one of my longest tenures at any job even at this point. Part of the job required us to attend the software workshops hosted by the department, so I got to learn a lot about the MS Office suite products, Apple apps like iMovie and GarageBand, as well as some basic Adobe Photoshop instruction. I also got really good at navigating unfamiliar software and helping people in the labs use that software for their class projects. Looking back, this was probably the first time I really got the taste of a brewing love for teaching. 

I spent my first year out of college in Chicago working as a research assistant in a psychology lab at DePaul University. I learned a LOT in that year, but the biggest take away lesson from that year was that I wanted to work more with the community than in the halls of academia. I love being in the collegiate atmosphere but I prefer the direct interaction with my community. It was this year when my mental and physical health started down a dark path. Nothing traumatic, but a more sneaking and leering feeling of stagnancy and not-enoughness. In that year I had disconnected from my art, from creative forms of expression, and I was physically separated from the loving and energizing creative community family that I had connected with in my time in Springfield. I felt alone and overwhelmed. I moved back home with my dad after my birthday that year. 

The next few years were filled with family, with laziness, with "homeifying" and "functionalizing" my dad's house, with a lot of soul searching to figure out what in the world I wanted to do. This was the period in my life when I really discovered the vastness of the content on YouTube. I definitely spent a lot of low times trying to ignore my life passing by while consuming video after video for hours. I did obtain my substitute teaching license and found a position at an alternative high school program, worked there for almost 2 years. I loved working with those kids more than I could have expected.

That experience reminded me how much I have to share and how I thoroughly enjoy sharing it. Teaching is something that's in my blood, my mom is a teacher, my whole extended family is littered with people dedicating their lives to education of others in some fashion. The reignited passionate feeling I got when working with my students reminded me of what passion felt like. It reminded that I used to be filled with passion, overflowing  with passion and ideas and plans. But I had lost it along my way through the world at some point. I had lost my passion and now that I tasted that eruptive feeling of inspiration and motivation again, I couldn't let myself lose it again.

So, I've made a couple of moves since then and acquired a super sweet rescue pitbull (in addition to my 2 other sweet handsome felines). I'm living in a positive space where I have room for my art and business to grow. Here, I have time and space to reflect; to invest my time and energy into creating the art that has been brewing in my brain, and my heart, and my hands. 

...join me 

I hope you can join me on this journey through creativity and life. Be sure to follow me on social media @besunshineart and sign up for PeriodicalSunshine to stay up on the Sunshine Curiosities.