Honesty and Friendship “I tell it like it is, I don’t sugarcoat it, I’m blunt,” Sydney tells me frankly. I’ve known Sydney since freshman year (for three years now), and I know this statement to be true. “I don’t try to be someone that I’m not.” A lot of Sydney’s life right now centers around the people that she loves, her friends. She is very passionate now about her close relationships. “Friends…[are the] most important things in my life.” She tells me about how she draws much of her inspiration from her different friends and how important they all are to her. She talks of how people might seem simple and uncomplicated at first, but “you look closer at people [and] that’s not all they are.” When you get closer to someone, you see different aspects of their personality that weren’t visible to you before. She has her eyes wide open, observing the world around her and taking it all in. “I don’t think there’s anything I can say,” she states in regard to expressing her deep feelings for her friends. When Sydney gets close to someone, she can’t describe them in one word, because when she is close with people, she is genuinely close — she knows too much about their complexities to sum it all up so simply. It wouldn’t do them any justice, in her mind. She gives her all to her friends, herself, and the world around her.

Emotion Sydney’s driving force lays in her emotions: “I care so much and I can’t help it. I’m so driven by emotion… I think with my heart before my head, which is why I think I love writing so much.” Sydney is an amazing writer who has a marvelously well-worded future ahead of her. Be it fiction, be it poetry, be it schoolwork, she writes ever-eloquently. She describes herself as “hard to sway” from emotions and impulses. Sydney is a strong romantic, able to see the beauty in the world and convey it through the written word. She also acknowledges that sometimes you just “can’t get your heart to talk to you.” As a passionate writer, she can speak quite honestly (as well as write): “Sometimes your heart comes out of your chest and says ‘I need to be taken care of’, or ‘I need to be heard right now.’” On the matter of thinking with her heart, she says that “Letting your heart decide will drive you to do impulsive things, but that’s not always a bad thing.” Sydney’s perspective is an envious one- not everybody can freely think with their heart and take a chance on their impulses. She is special.

Beliefs and Personality Believing in ghosts, astrology, aliens, love, and soulmates- all of those things make life more interesting, Sydney tells me, twisting towards me as I hold my notepad in hand, jotting down notes about one of my closest friends. As earlier stated, she is a strong romantic. She had posed some questions to me for my interview, and I threw a few of the same back at her; for example, ‘What would you never change about yourself?’ “[I] would never change my personality,” she tells me, or “my ability to tell stories, my ability to make people laugh, even the way I snap at people.” She doesn’t suppress any part of her personality, because she is an honest person- it’s part of her personality. “I am always unapologetically myself.”

Passion On passions, she doesn’t believe that you have to be good at something to be passionate about it: “As long as what you’re passionate about makes you happy,” you’re on the right track, according to Sydney. She wants to see where her passion for writing takes her, where her fantastic talent for painting words into glorious stories can take her.  Sydney words things like the superb writer she is — it’s hard not to get caught up in the emotion of her pieces. She wants to write to inspire and help people — she draws much of her own inspiration from her friends, the people she surrounds herself with. She wants to inspire even just one person with what she does so they have the courage to do what they love.

Inspiration She may garner her inspiration from her friends, but I believe that many of her friends get their inspiration from her. She is incredibly bright, spunky, and unique. She is always herself, and isn’t afraid to express that. Her beautiful webs of stories that she has spun effervescently capture the dewdrops of her inspiration to make a fantastically shining world all her own. When you are friends with Sydney, she shares this fantastic wonderful world with you.