Right Jeans, Wrong Feeling
Making from Memory: The Younger Self | A 100 Day Creative Practice | Day Seven
I am loving what we are doing so much that I broke down and ordered some really nice C’aran Dache colored pencils for the rest of the challenge. I also ordered a 10 X 10 lay-flat sketchbook to give me some room to play on the page. And I ordered the same for Jon, since he is going to be laid up starting Wednesday, which is when he goes in for his tendon surgery, so, he’ll have a lot of time to draw.
Have I mentioned I really do love to draw? I made a lot of different kinds of art during my decade as a Waldorf teacher, including a great deal of drawing. Once I even tried to draw the Mona Lisa, very imperfectly (this was about twenty years ago, and then two weeks ago, I got to see the actual painting at the Louvre; life is so amazing).
Speaking of amazing, I have some fantastic good news to share—I just learned last night that my work will appear in the anthology Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing next year. I love the editors at DPA—when they say they champion women’s writing, they mean it. You can read more about their ethics and my past experience with them (including the backstory of my essay, “What My Father Knew,” that will appear in the anthology) in this post. But for now, just know I’m really thrilled for this news, and it makes me want to write a whole essay about what it means to claim and reclaim your voice despite the efforts of those who would prefer you to keep silent.
Meanwhile, here we are on Day Seven of the 100 Days of Making & Writing, and I have to keep saying to you: as always, if you’ve missed a day, or two, or more—just start where you are. And if you haven’t joined the project or the chat yet, here’s how:
Join Jeannine Ouellette’s subscriber chat
Just look at the extraordinary work you’re creating, just from showing up?
And moving into Day Seven, where we’re exploring a specific moment for a past self.
And when we think about specific moments, it gets interesting, because our understanding of those moments is not static. For example, there are moments of embarrassment or separation that transform over time—that become, with enough distance, something closer to pride. The story I’ve told you about my first wedding, about clapping for myself while my father-in-law looked on in horror —I don’t flinch at all at that memory anymore. Mostly now I feel tender toward that girl, proud of her audacity, grateful she didn’t yet know enough to stop herself. Time did that. Time and the slow work of understanding what that moment was actually made of.
But there are other memories of feeling set apart that don’t transform in the same way. The ones that still carry their original weight, their original chill. For me, those are the memories of being the new girl—over and over, in school after school, move after move, until by the time I landed in my father’s home for middle school, the sense of social isolation had become something close to debilitating. And the strange, haunting thing about it is how invisible it was. From the outside, I know I looked more or less normal—shy, yes, and maybe a little shell-shocked to the trained eye, but otherwise fine. The right jeans. The right hair. Enough friends to pass. Yet, right underneath that surface of normalcy lived an aloneness so profound, so total, it nearly consumed me.
Now, when I have some small experience of doing the wrong thing, not knowing how things work, being on the outside of an impenetrable wall, I can at least see it unfolding from a distance, I can observe myself having that feeling, and understand the wrinkle in time that brings the past into the present, fleetingly. This understanding helps me see that the present, small experience is just that: a small experience. And then I can exhale the outsized feeling. But I don’t scold myself for having the feeling in the first place. I’ve come to believe it’s true what Albert Einstein said about time:
For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
He meant, more or less (I’m no physicist), that the flow of time is subjective, and that all moments in the universe exist simultaneously in a four-dimensional reality.
That’s part of why this 100 Days of Making & Writing Project is so powerful, no matter how many days we miss. The 100 isn’t the point. The making & writing are the point.
Chapter One | Day Seven| Making from Memory: The Younger Self
Here is where we return to a past version of ourselves, caught in a moment of