Something’s come up during essay class. Another misbelief.
Which if you look back at previous posts, you’ll see these are false ideas that other people have often laid on you and that you have accepted as part of reality, even if you disagree. Or misbeliefs are something you’ve decided are true, when in fact, they’re just not.
This is why trusting yourself, believing your body when it tells you that something is wrong, is so important for all of us (adults) and for our children to learn.
Yet I still believe that writing about myself is narcissistic and navel-gazing. That if I do it and do it too much that I risk turning into a self-involved and toxic person who only thinks of herself. (Yes, I believe this on a deep level, hammered into me by continual and repeated demonstrations and by the fears of others. I was raised with these beliefs, many given to me carelessly by men, preachers, who turned out later to only want to control me and who were wildly projecting.)
I am not surprised that I still carry this odd idea around. It’s shame. We’re shamed with this kind of ideology both in and out of religion, but religion is really good at it. They’ve perfected it and now it’s in all areas of life. We shame others, all because we feel the panic within ourselves, the “I don’t want to be seen as weak, or I don’t want to lose” feelings. You can’t walk around as a human without feeling shame for something.
But our society has a very odd way of behaving. They want spectacle, they want the scoop, but if you don’t reveal it, you’re not being honest. So, we tell something and then no one believes it. It’s a catch-22.
To counter this misbelief, I must stop caring about what others think of me. So much of writing is believing that you have something important to share, something that you must say out loud, and I think readers can tell when writers are not completely in agreement with themselves. It doesn’t ring true.
Will it help me to tell it? Tell it. Will it help others to tell it? It must still help me first.
See how I recast the misbelief?
I think part of me posting on my blog is to test whether I actually have the courage to write about me and not immediately dive into the nearby bushes to hide. It’s about me challenging this misbelief. It’s my way of reclaiming the space I need to write about myself.
It’s also part of my process. Confronting my misbeliefs. Reclaiming what’s mine. My story. My childhood. My life. My feelings and thoughts about all of it. I know people will not agree, but this space, this blog is me staring down what tries to stop me. Giving me the room to spread out, make space, enlarge, refuse to shrink.
This is my story. These are my observations. If you don’t like it, write your own.
I have another misbelief. Remember when I talked about it a few weeks ago? My misbelief about my essay writing and that I believed something that was not true: 1. That an essay or any piece of writing is supposed to arrive on the page ready and done. That what you imagine in your brain arrives instantly and that if it doesn’t, you’re no good. (Yes, this sounds ridiculous, but I still believe this on a deep level.)
I have another misbelief around my art and being an artist. I have this dumb idea that if you haven’t gone to art school or didn’t start making art when you were young that it’s too late. This I’m not sure where it came from. Probably just my insecurities raising their hackles each time I say out loud “I am an artist.”
I have never been able to draw much more than stick figures. However, I used to pride myself on always coloring within the lines.
Yes, I’m firstborn, why do you ask?
I’m very much a rules-follower by training. My growing up environment taught me quickly to obey and to obey instantly.
My natural bent is that I’ve also got an Aquarius moon, so sometimes, just for fun, I like to blow up that perfect, just to see what happens. This is my natural writer sensibility. I’m curious. I’m sensitive, but I’m also the kid who just has to try, just to see.
I got in trouble for it a lot in school. In elementary school, they handed out cards with Goofie on it and if you did something wrong, you got a Goofie. I got a lot of those. On the playground, I would act out, and once I pulled a friend’s skirt up while on the jungle gym. Oh she was mad. Then in the elementary school cafeteria, I opened my mouth to another friend while it was full of food. Oh she was even madder.
I just couldn’t help myself. Now I wonder if there was some ADHD going on. All I wanted was to please my teachers, my parents, my pastor, and God. But I just didn’t want to give up on the freedom. I wanted to just try stuff.
And now? The childhood courage needs a little bit more prodding. It’s harder to try new things and I have to work at it not to come up with an excuse.
If you’re over 45 like me and find yourself needing some courage, consider this your push to try.
I confess these things on a public blog to get myself to move and to hold myself accountable, and you’re welcome to borrow permission for something that you’ve long feared, but really want.
Do you watch PROJECT RUNWAY or MAKING THE CUT? Then you understand. If not, bear with me.
For me, there’s power in putting together right sides of fabric, sewing a seam, and having the pieces turn into clothing. Remember my years in 4H? I had always watched my grandmother sew and my great aunt ran a fabric store in her small town in southern Oregon. She started selling quilting fabrics out of her trunk, and then turned it into a steady business. It was like catnip for me. I still have quilts and embroidered pillowcases from both my great-grandmother and my husband’s great-grandmother.
It started when I joined 4H. I was completely smitten. I dreamed about learning how to sew like I knew my grandmother and great aunt could sew. But I also dreamed about taking a mannequin and draping fabric on it to see what I could create. I often stood in front of a full-length mirror and draped fabric off one of my shoulders to see what it looked like.
Thus, when PROJECT RUNWAY started, I got addicted. And then in 2021, someone I know participated in the show herself and told me what classes she took to prepare. And now here I am learning the draping, the sloper (the sample muslin you make for fitting purposes), and how to make the fit perfect.
I sometimes can’t believe how much the Internet has changed our lives. For one thing, the Internet is annoying. But I can sign up for patternmaking classes from someone who lives in the Midwest and I can learn how to do something I’ve wanted to learn to do since I was 12.
Remember Gertrude? The doll-size mannequin I’m currently sewing for? Get ready for PROJECT RUNWAY, doll size. LOL.
What can we say about the history of abstract art?
It’s been a part of our DNA from before there was history. Marks left on pottery and on the walls of caves were not only representative of real-life animals or humans, but often were “simple, geometric, and linear forms that had a symbolic or decorative purpose.” (source)
Abstract painting for me is very symbolic. My daily practice of repetitive painting the same shapes day after day soothes me. Some people watch carpet cleaning or window washing videos for purposes of ASMR, but for me, painting shapes in my favorite shades and hues regulates my body and makes me connect. Even if it only for a few minutes each day, my practice makes me happy. It makes me an artist in a world where the pressure on creatives to make money from their artistic hobby looms large. It is the thing I do for myself.
This differentiates me from Hilma af Klint, but only slightly. In af Klint’s world, Sweden was not the European Union country it is today. My maternal great-grandfather was born in Sweden in 1890 and was put on a boat to Canada in 1905 alone as a young boy, as a way of keeping him from having to be conscripted into the ongoing secession of Norway from Sweden.
In a fight begun by Napoleon 100 years before, the tensions between Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had simmered for decades, and in 1905, when war looked as if it would break out, my great-great-grandparents, Per and Britta Enstrom, put their third son, Ernest Enstrom, on a boat bound for North America. Once he arrived, the family name changed to Engstrom, and Ernest saved for years to bring the rest of his family to America. He wasn’t able to do it in time for his father, Per, to come over, however. Per passed away in 1910 in Torsang, Sweden.
Only in the past few years have I spent time looking back at what my Grandpa Engstrom left behind in Sweden. He was one of eight children—four brothers, three sisters—and after immigrating, they all settled in various parts of the Pacific Northwest (our dog vet’s last name is Engstrom, and we’ve agreed that we’re likely distant cousins) and even Minnesota (hello to my cousins in the Midwest). I’ve been looking at Google Maps at Torsang, Sweden. It’s a small community, with an amazing kirk that I would love to visit someday, and maybe visit my great-great-grandfather’s headstone. But I think I need to do a lot more research on Ancestry.com and perhaps online at Swedish historical societies before I go. But I can dream.
Torsang is situated around an inland lake, and it looks lovely. There are teeny neighborhoods tucked in along the lake’s shores, but it’s not like the United States, which don’t offer public access to the lake. Instead of driving alongside the perimeter of a lake in my community, in Sweden, you can actually see the lake.
Part of this is that in Sweden the population is much smaller than compared to where I live in a populous county that also encompasses a large urban city. It’s not fair to compare, but it helps me to imagine how life 120 years in Sweden. And how wonderful the United States must have sounded to people, a land full of jobs and opportunity with so many people doing well (or at least that’s how it seemed). And how hard it must have been for my great-grandfather to save up all his money to bring his family over.
Hilma af Klint never left Sweden and even though she was 30 years older than my great-grandfather, I can’t imagine life was easy for her. She lived with an expectation for women to let the men have the right of way, that men were the artists, that men were the ones who were acclaimed. And Hilma said no, thanks, and took the right of way for herself. What courage!
She gives me courage to take the right of way that is in front of me. I don’t have the restrictions Hilma had, as I don’t have to explain why I want to write essays or make art as a woman. But I do have to fight the urge to self-reject, to talk myself out of taking the next step, to not stop before I get where I’m going.
I’m not alone in this, I think. One of the first steps into something new is often met with resistance. As Steven Pressfield writes in THE WAR OF ART, “Resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, or spiritually. So if you’re in Calcutta working with the Mother Teresa Foundation and you’re thinking of bolting to launch a career in telemarketing . . . relax. Resistance will give you a free pass.”
I keep repeating myself on this blog. But a lot of my goals in 2023 are about my process. Life gets moving so fast and we all have too much email and overflowing todo lists and I am determined to have something else to talk about in my life.
Work is work.
But life is amazing.
I’m overzealously taking an essay class and so far, it’s stretching me far beyond the process. This is hard process work.
Essays are not easy for me. I get extremely self-conscious with essays, so often procrastinate for months, back up into an essay with an explosion of words, print the words out, and then don’t touch it again for a long time. I create a mountain out of it. This year, as I “do it for the process” and practice “the art of observing” I’m realizing I’m really overthinking things.
It doesn’t have to be this hard. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be a process. It can flow. This is the first teacher I’ve had whose process writing essays makes sense to me. I took two of her shorter classes in 2022 and she has such an ease and way of pulling writing out of me. She also makes it seem less like a mountain and more of a bunny slope. It reminds me of being on cross-country skis when I was young. I was fine until I hit a slope and then I fell.
Of course, I fell! That’s part of the process.
I had whipped up my idea of an “essay” as something official and fancy and also that formed perfectly onto the page as I imagined it. It should just translate to the page without hiccups or garble or confusion. Our brains are magnificent, and surely they can dictate a magnificent essay on one try.
HA.
Why do we as writers think like this? I have worked with writers for nearly 30 years. I know this belief is not true. It’s like the misbelief we talk about when plotting a story. A misbelief is something the protagonist believes at her core, but is ultimately untrue, but it shapes her life.
For instance, the president of White Star Line believed that the Titanic was unsinkable. So much so that they removed the necessary lifeboats from the decks of the ship to make it more streamlined and appear less crowded (this is the truth; it came out in the court case and has been heavily reported).
This shaped his entire view of Titanic’s first voyage. If the ship was unsinkable, there was no need to worry, even after they hit the iceberg, even after the ship began taking on water, even after the available lifeboats were used up (he jumped on one himself, the coward; again, he testified to this in court), and the remaining passengers struggled to stay on the ship until the very last second.
This belief so influenced the disaster of the Titanic that it became high drama and has compelled us to think a lot about that event in the intervening 111 years. Had that misbelief not permeated everything about that first voyage, things might have gone very differently. What if they had been more careful about their speed in the night? What if they had spotted the iceberg sooner (they didn’t have binoculars in the bird’s nest that night. WHAT?)? What if there had been enough lifeboats for everyone?
My misbelief is that I should be able to dictate what I want to say to the page much faster and much easier than I currently am able. If I allow that misbelief to impact all of my decisions, I will likely not ever finish the book I’m writing, nor will I ever get an essay done.
So I have to let go. This teacher’s classes are the reminder I need to be more loosey-goosey about the process. What is in my head takes work to translate to the page and it takes longer than I think it will take. It is not a one-shot deal. It’s multiple times going back and going back and thinking differently. It’s less about getting it right fast and more about just getting it right.
Thinking through my writing process with a few select teachers helps the blank page not feel so intimidating. Their advice has helped me loosen up enough to even get back to this blog, which is no small feat.
Another professor was kind enough to remind me that revision is part of writing (I say this to my author clients all the time but forgot it for myself!) and that I could possibly breathe a bit more (he suggests gently as I write a first draft that has a lot of intensity and white-hot emotion). A lot of my first drafts sound strangled, like I’m so determined they will work for what I need them to do that they are gasping for air.
This is true. The intensity of complex PTSD symptoms hits like a ton of bricks. You don’t get to choose the timing or how long those symptoms last. Sometimes it feels like a tsunami and you’re just hanging on or you’re being sucked along without control.
I’m a writer. I’m sensitive. My mood seeps into my drafts and determines how my sentences form and sound on the page, and my CPTSD pushes me to create long, winding sentences that go on and on for a while, much like this one.
I can let go. I don’t have to hang on so tight. I can be more strategic with my right-branching sentences (a run-on has the subject and verb near the beginning, while other forms of a more compact, long sentence might put the subject/verb near the end, strategically).
I’m like a kid in a candy store with this kind of thing. It’s fun to relearn how to write and not just rely on the old tricks I used to rely on (procrastination, perfectionism), which got me to where I am today, and I’m grateful, trust me. However, I’m looking for incremental improvement here.
Bear with me a bit more as I drone on and on about process.
I’m notorious for drawing the same shapes over and over all while using the same color palette (warm red, orange, yellow, pinks). I still haven’t figured out why though, except, I think this is another of my “do it for the process” things. You’ll see the results of my habit all over this website thanks to my savvy and brilliant web designer, Jenny.
I started in 2017 with acrylic gouache, taking a pattern class given by Lisa Congdon, but then discovered the beauty of watercolor and watercolor gouache and took a five-year detour playing with watercolor, sloshing my brushes into water cups.
In 2023, I’m moving back to acrylic gouache, just for the opaque quality of the colors and because of this amazing book:
I’m also going to try and branch out a bit, back to practicing Lisa Congdon’s pattern class, just to challenge myself to learn more techniques. I’m excited to paint more with acrylic gouache.
I want to add backgrounds to my little shape drawings. I keep admiring the abstract artists who don’t choose to paint on a neutral background, but with dark and rich backgrounds, similar to August Wren and Zoe Ingram (the author of the OH MY GOAUCHE book above).
I am doing it for the process but will try to update you all as I go! It’s going to look a little different than the shapes I do now. I’m a little bit scared!
Do you do anything “for the process”? Would love to hear about it!
I’m doing things differently in 2023 “for the process” (my mentor’s mantra is “do it for the process”) of creativity. These are projects that I don’t intend to use to meet deadlines. This process work is for me, just for me. And I find it fascinating, so I want to talk more about it.
I grew up in 4H, not for livestock or gardening, but for sewing. We met in the upstairs classroom above the gym at my church and a few of us (you could count the attendees on one hand) middle schoolers learned our first basic sewing techniques.
The first thing I sewed was a skirt for myself and I wore said skirt in a 4H statewide fashion show and I did not win the blue ribbon. I think I might have won participant or something. It was an elastic skirt, made of some sort of stiff and very difficult to work with cotton. It had an elastic waist and was a dusky blue (very popular 1980s colorway; popular again now!) and I only remember how nervous I was and that they mispronounced my name. Instead of Tricia, they said Tray-cia. It’s funny how I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was 11 or 12, so it was sometime in 1985. I did pass a skill level after that show, however, which gives me great satisfaction.
I returned to sewing in my late teens and got really good at it. I was sewing most of my own clothes in my early to mid-twenties and then suddenly, I stopped. I had inadvertently saved the fabric and pattern of a skirt I had cut out in 1998 (when I suddenly stopped sewing). The emerging situation may have something to do with finally making an excess income from my freelance business that I started in 1995 and being able to afford shopping at stores for my clothes and also not having as much time to sew any longer because of said freelance business.
A few years ago, my old Kenmore sewing machine died and instead of paying to repair it, I bought a new one, and a serger machine. And then once again, life got very busy, and I piled things on top of the sewing table in my guest room.
Fast forward to 2023, in the past week, I dug out my guest room after returning from my trip to Europe (Iceland), which often happens after I travel. I get inspired to get back to something I have been neglecting. This time, I had been neglecting organization in my house, and I started in my guest room.
It’s now clutter free and ready to be used as an actual guest room again (my first guest arrives within the month) and as a craft room.
One other thing: in a fit of inspiration at the close of 2021, I signed up for online drafting classes and for most of 2022 have had an doll-sized mannequin sitting on my drafting table in my guest room (I named her Gertrude) waiting for me to sew her some clothes. She’s half-size, so all the work I do for Gertrude, I can then convert to full-size for my own clothing later on. I have cut out the slopers for Gertrude, but then stopped when 2022 got a bit overwhelming. Again, the freelance business has been quite busy. But I worked too much in the second half of 2022 and I’m going to not do that in 2023. I’m going to take the time I need to “do it for the process” so that I can 1. Not just work and 2. Be interested in all the things I love. Once again, it’s doing it for my self, and no one else.
I was very sure I’d forgotten everything I ever knew about sewing. And then I went to thread the sewing machine and it came back, in a flood. All the little details, all the endless redoing of seams, the pressing of seams, the pinning, the fitting, the addition of pockets, the zippers, the buttonholes!
It’s fun to be back doing it for the process. It’s nice to have something that no one will see until I decide to wear it. It’s fun to plot the linen tops and dresses I intend to sew this year. And it’s fun that finally in late 2022, I was able to fly to New York for the first time since 2019. I didn’t get to Mood and the garment district in December, but I’ll be there in 2023. I cannot wait. I’ve missed it. The button shop, the trim shop, the rooms of fabric rolls. It’s going to be a great year for the process.
Trish standing in Mood fabrics in September 2019.
Why sewing, you ask? I think it’s the fabric store. The ritual of flipping through the latest pattern books, finding a pattern and look that I love and want to recreate, and then finding the fabric for it. Or going about it the other way, finding a fabric that makes my knees weak, and buying up a large enough cut of it so that when I find the right pattern, I’m set. Either way makes me so happy.
I think my love for it stems from one time I went to the fabric store with my late grandmother. She would see that I was bored, and she asked if I wanted to go with her (I shrugged and said okay). I was always broke, however, and had less than 10 bucks at any given moment. But after wandering around, I found a remnant in the clearance bin (I’m very good at shopping and even better at shopping sales) and the yardage I needed required that I borrow twenty bucks. Grandma Bee handed it over and I got to buy my fabric.
I paid her back. But I never forgot that moment. I can still picture myself perched over the remnant table calculating how much I needed and how much I could afford. I remember how happy Grandma Bee was that I found something I loved so much. I miss her.
I have two cupboards full of fabric right now. I don’t need any more!
I love texture and get caught up in how garments feel on the rack at clothing stores. I was just in Iceland and felt every single sweater and thus only was attracted to sweaters that met my exacting textural requirements (aka soft enough). Same thing with the knitting store in Reykjavik and their wall full of yarn. I couldn’t stop touching the merino silk yarns. Their softness won me over. I found the one sweater that I loved and of course, it was too much money for my budget.
Reyjavik, Handknitting Association of Iceland
We had a great trip to Iceland, cold and snowy as it was. A few more shots of the ice and snow, but also of love and color and joy!
Geothermal-warmed street in Reykjavik on New Year’s Eve, 2022.
Fireworks, New Year’s Eve, Reykjavik, Iceland, December 31, 2022
Throughout much of 2022, I poured over art books, especially featuring women artists who create abstract work: Georgia O’Keefe, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Sonia Delaunay, Judi Chicago, Mary Cassatt, and Hilma af Klint.
An aside: Do you know the name Lee Krasner? Probably not. She married Jackson Pollock in 1942 and he was her pupil. But why is Pollock the name we all know and not Krasner? I wonder.
What is abstract art? It’s not a style or genre, but a mode or method, says one male abstract artist and historian. Another male artist says it is a form of language based on visual symbols.
For years, abstract painters who became famous and got all the exhibitions in museums have been disproportionately male. We barely know all the names of the women who pioneered abstract art and basically provided a road map for the men to follow: Who is truly an abstract painter? The names we now recognize easily or the names we still don’t know?
A book I got from the library has filled the gaps in my knowledge, WOMEN IN ABSTRACTION, and what a wondrous delight is it to see the history of abstract painting stretching back as far as the 1880s. Georgina Houghton birthed the movement, art that at its inception was assumed grew from spiritualism roots. These days, abstract art’s chronology is continuously being rewritten and has little to do with spiritualism; it’s everywhere in our modern lives and is often now what makes a space feel truly modern. Look at West Elm or Marimekko for a glimpse of abstract art that lives in our homes with us. It says nothing about our souls, but it does give our souls peace, at least it does mine.
In the past few years, I’ve been obsessed with and collecting books about Sonia Delaunay, a 1930s-era French abstract painter (also a fellow surface pattern designer and quite famous in her native country), but in 2021, I fell in love with Hilma af Klint. Not because of her mysticism and obsession with spiritualism, but because her art is incredibly cool.
For my holiday gifts this year, I received several books about Hilma af Klint’s work. (Note: If you love horror shows on streaming services, ARCHIVE 81, based on the podcast by the same name, has a character and plot line loosely based on af Klint’s life/work, and no, af Klint’s real life and real contribution to art were not horrifying in the least, contrary to the show. It’s a great show, if you like gory horror and want to be scared, though. I’m bummed we won’t get a second season.
I seek to enjoy af Klint’s work through the abstract lens, cutting away her Madame Blavatsky mysticism and long and committed venture into spiritualism. She’s got a great eye, and her work, locked away by her heirs for twenty years after her death at her request, has not been widely shown until the 2010s. But recently several books have been produced to introduce readers to not only her life, her interest in mysticism/spiritualism, and her working notebooks.
Hilma af Klint created luscious landscapes of her native Sweden in her earliest days of art making and it was these landscapes that she showed publicly through her life, and which provided her income. It was around 1880 that she began to explore the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky after the death of a beloved sister and as she moved further into spiritualism, af Klint believed she heard from her “High Master” about the art she became dedicated to creating for the rest of her life. The Five were women artists who created automatic art at the bequest of these High Masters. They were creating art for a future world, a future religion, a future temple, one that they would not live to see, and one that they felt sure the world needed to survive the future.
Of course, nothing of the sort came to pass. The spiritualism of the early twentieth century was quickly replaced by other beliefs as the world changed, and more wickedly, the abstract art of men was given higher billing. In 1934, artist and patron Katherine S. Dreier, who in 1920 had co-founded the Societe Anonyme, Inc., the first musuem of modern art in the United States, with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, put on a show of female-only painters called “From Impressionism to Abstractionism.” And Peggy Guggenheim hosted female abstract painters in her gallery in the 1940s.
As WOMEN IN ABSTRACTION reports: “Although they were known in their day, none of these artists have been accepted into the ‘canon,’ proving, if proof were needed, how much the narrative has sidelined important figures, and raising questions about a system of art history that could marginalize certain works.”
It wasn’t until the 1970s that female abstract artists were again given exhibitions and shows. And during this decade, Hilma af Klint still waited. It was not until 1984 that Hilma af Klint’s work was shown to an audience. Over 1200 pieces of art! It was not until 1986 when her work was shown in Los Angeles at an exhibition that af Klint received international attention. And now, nearly forty years later, we’re getting books and even a movie (available on Kanopy). In spring 2022, af Klint’s exhibition in Wellington, New Zealand drew thousands of visitors.
Perhaps af Klint was creating art for the future, just not in the way she thought. Rather than for a temple dedicated to a “High Master,” instead we get to experience Hilma’s vision knowing that humans are fallible and that perhaps art, in which we recognize the humanness of the work (not the AI-created mishmash failures now being produced by software) we now get to see the incredible imagination of an artist whose work was and will remain timeless.
Hilma af Klint, Paintings for the Temple, 1915 (source: Guggenheim).
Sometimes you find joy in the little things. A ring my grandmother wore and received from her father, my great-grandfather, made of silver and with a jade stone, has been a treasured keepsake and a ring I wear every day. Years ago, I looked down at my hand and realized I wasn’t wearing it and I couldn’t remember where I had set it down. Years later (I know!), while cleaning out a dark cupboard of old towels, I found it, tucked in between. It had slid off as I was putting away laundry.
Recently, the silver band cracked and broke and couldn’t be worn. I took the ring to Ben Bridge jewelers at the mall, but they sent me to a jewelry repair kiosk at the other end of the main thoroughfare. “He knows silver and gold,” the jewelry store employee promised.
True to her word, I dropped the ring off for repair and when I picked it up, the repair couldn’t even be seen. That was a week ago and not a day goes by that I don’t look down at my hand and thrill a little bit that this ring, handmade in the 1940s, is still being worn and treasured. I think I gushed multiple times to the jewelry repair person that the ring was priceless, one of a kind.
I’m also sure they’ve heard that so many times before.
But in this case, it’s true. It’s a treasured ring, even with its flaws and repairs. It’s a piece of my great-grandfather, who died the year before I was born, and a big piece of my grandmother, who was a beloved person in my life. Both she and my Grandpa supported me, loved me, and prayed for me every single night. Wearing this ring means I’m wearing that love. I’m so happy to have it back on my hand where it belongs.
Joy in the little things is sustaining me. The end of this year is like driving 75 mph in a school zone or something. It feels like we’re just all racing to keep up and then having to focus and move so carefully through the world.
I keep giving advice to my creative clients to find the joy wherever they can, however they can. I’m taking my own advice. I dance a little jig when I find that yes, indeed, there is another pack of double-stuf Oreos in the pantry. I go out after dark and stare up at the stars as much as I can. I sit in the sunny spots in my living room, like a cat, soaking up the warmth. I thrill each time I turn on my gas fireplace in order to give the room I’m going to read that extra cozy layer of heat. I laugh WITH my dog as he wakes from a deep sleep and his big mushy face is all indented (no really, I’m laughing at him and he knows it!).
I cannot wait for the holiday lights to go up. I can’t wait to turn on all of my season-specific playlists and alas, am already running out of hiding places for Christmas gifts for my husband. And I cannot wait for New Year’s this year, celebrating with friends.
I’m a little bit wound up to plan my 2023 and have already broken out the highlighters, multi-colored sticky notes (hello, Kanban boards!), and find myself starting my end of the year planning a bit earlier than usual. Call it the Covid factor. I keep saying (to myself mostly) that the new year is going to be better. I predicted that 2022 was going to bring good things, but it was going to take three times as long to get those things done. For 2023, I think we’re going to break through. I have no logical reasoning for this, but my own gut instinct, so take that with a big disclaimer.
But I know that we’re still in the middle of a protracted and long season of political fights for the future of our country. The recent election just made that very clear. So many communities do not have good feelings about 2023. I stand with them: trans rights are human rights, LBGTQIA rights are human rights, bodily autonomy is a human right, and book banning is always an assault on democracy. Lots of work to be done in 2023.
Keep finding the joy.
I hope you too find the little joys to sustain you during these stressful days.
In 2021, I grew fascinated with the idea of childhood and how childhood has been viewed throughout history. It came from reading a college textbook about children’s and young adult literature. In the first chapter, a set of questions were posed for students to consider as they worked through the entire book. I got stuck on one of them and have basically been obsessed about it ever since.
Do children themselves have any influence, agency, or voice in how they are perceived, or are they wholly subject to what adults imagine them to be?
What a question, right? It’s led me into such a rich research process, both seeking to answer this question in my professional work (children’s and young adult literature is my day job) and my personal work (I’m currently working on a couple of children’s lit and young adult projects), and it’s even made me think a lot about my own childhood.
For one thing, we all have things about our childhoods that we did not like. Fair. But I hadn’t really pondered how I would have preferred those events to go. I would not have traded living in Oregon, for starters. Even when it felt like any dream I had could never come true because of where I lived. For instance, at 14, my longtime piano teacher began to mention to me the possibility of attending college based on my piano skills.
“Julliard,” she said, “they have rooms of used baby grands that people donate, and you can practice in one of those rooms for hours if you want to.”
Julliard was located in New York City, which for all intents and purposes in my head, was another planet. This was 1988. I grew up in the backwoods of Oregon (haha, I’m joking, but we did live in the woods, far from the big city of Portland, and Portland is not big. Not like New York City).
There are just not as many people in Oregon. And as a kid, you heard stories about New York City, not all of them great. Plus, a college like Julliard cost money and I had zero ideas about how I would even pay for any of this. Like zero ideas. I was Generation X and we were raised differently, just because of who our parents were and also the fact that the world in which I lived was completely analog.
And I was not a super dedicated student. I was a daydreamer and had to repeat Algebra twice in middle school. I would frequently zone out during a class that didn’t feel interesting and think about something else. I was also slightly boy crazy. I think journalism class was my favorite, but I was so reserved that asking people questions for a story felt out of my league. I also loved jazz choir, where I was the pianist (happiest moments were jamming with the drummer and bass guitarist before choir class began), but to attempt to become a concert pianist? My dad’s stepsister was a concert pianist, but I barely knew her. And I was so young. I think someone suggested I reach out to her and ask questions, but I didn’t.
Because it was a comfortable life. To take a grand leap to attend college in New York would have been such a massive shift in my worldview and would have required I leave the safety of the world into which I had been born.
Fast forward thirty years and in 2018, I was in New York on a business trip just having finished lunch with an editor at Disney. I sat down at an outdoor space across the street from Juilliard on a fall September day and ate a brownie I bought from a coffee and tea kiosk and thought about what might have been. It was surreal. The honking of horns from taxis as the traffic flew past, the guy who dropped a twenty-dollar bill after buying his coffee, and his gratefulness when I picked it up and handed it back to him. I thought about if I had been 18 and living in New York and practicing the piano for hours at a time on one of those used baby grands in those practice rooms. I thought of what might have been.
Generation X had very big dreams, but the world hadn’t shifted in time for me to even begin to figure out how to get to Juilliard and New York City. I’m intensely proud of my Generation X friends who are parents and raising Generation Z, who see life so differently and are able to imagine a future so much bigger than I ever could at their age. I love this. It makes me so happy. Generation Z is going to do amazing things. Millennials are also rethinking things and raising a generation that’s going to do things differently.
So, back to my question:
Do children themselves have any influence, agency, or voice in how they are perceived, or are they wholly subject to what adults imagine them to be?
I had a little bit of influence, agency, or voice, at least I think. Others may disagree. But I think I should have had so much more. That’s what I think could have been different. My life has worked out great for me. I work at a job I love, I still get to live in the Pacific Northwest, my work takes me to New York City a lot, and I don’t hang on to that much regret.
As I work on a YA writing project and remember back to being 16, I’m so very aware of how far I’ve come, how much I’ve learned, and how bright my future is.
I will keep you posted on how the writing is going.
