for decades i've been joking with friends, "why can't someone just pay me to be me?" so imagine my glee when i read this quote in Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World):
"Basically I get paid to be myself--and for my imagination. My job is to be as creative and as eccentric as I can possibly be, and my job changes every day because I'm obsessed with changes."
dream job, right? except it's not as easy as it sounds:
"Not trying to be anything other than who you are. That's an absurdly difficult thing to do, and it takes many years."
no shit.
this morning i had the sudden thought: maybe i should make a list of all the things i say i should be doing, but don't do. like writing, for example. for probably 25 years, people (the infamous "people") have been telling me that i should write. given that i have nothing but time on my hands these days, it seems like if i really wanted to write, i'd be doing it. (more than the occasional blog post, i mean.) do i say i want to write because i actually have the desire, or do i tell myself i should have the desire because others tell me i might have a knack for it?
at the library the other day, i spotted an anthology of essays, Mentors, Muses & Monsters - 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. in the opening essay, the book's editor Elizabeth Benedict writes of her mentor, Elizabeth Hardwick, someone she studied with in 1970's:
She had been a towering figure to us when we were very young, the first real writer any of us knew at a time that's hard to imagine now, when "women writers" were an exotic species, and when wanting to grow up and be one put you in far more exclusive company than it does today. It was not as rare as wanting to be President--which no one wanted to do--but for either sex, it was far from the bustling, vocational school industry that it is today.
suddenly i was 17 again, in Miss M's junior English class and being handed back my modern, satirical take on the Cinderella fable. she'd given me an A- on the story and written in the margin: "The minus is because I doubt its originality." i felt like someone had kicked me in the solar plexus. she thought i'd plagiarized it? although i'd slogged through the horrible 500-word essays sometimes assigned to us in high school English classes about books i loathed (so-called classics), this was the first piece of original writing i'd ever dared to attempt. i can still remember lying on my twin bed in my childhood bedroom and smiling when it was done because (ohmygod) i think it might be actually sort of good and maybe even funny. my dear friend who sat next to me in class saw how crushed i was about the teacher's remark and tried to console me by telling me i should feel flattered that my writing would seem like a professional's. but i didn't feel flattered--i felt invisible. it felt like the message was loud and clear: you are not capable of doing this. and i didn't write again until i was 30.
going back to Benedict's description of wanting to be a writer in the 70's, it did seem exotic and rare to have those desires back then. (i was 17 in 1972.) i lived in a small town with a single father who to this day, i've never heard utter the words "creative" or "creativity." "art" was for a very select few and in those days i think i equated art with painting. (i had two friends whose dads were painters.) i'm not sure it occurred to me that performers were artists, even though i'd been performing (often secretly) since i was little, let alone that art could be associated with words. i wasn't a reader back then. in fact, i hated to read except for Seventeen magazine and i loved Seventeen for the images, not the articles.
in November i began keeping a 'spirit notebook' after seeing this video by Lori-Lyn (she talks about her spirit notebook beginning at the 1:30 mark). the other day i realized that there are more collages in mine than anything else. (i realize we call them dreamboards now, but i've been making them for 30 years so still think of them as collages.) ;) i've always been powerfully drawn to images, yet i often try to do most of my communicating in a more linear fashion with words. today i'm asking myself: do i do that because that's what feels most natural, or do i often use words rather than images because i think that's what others expect of me?
scrolling through all of the lovely messages left on my Facebook wall on my birthday earlier this month, it jumped out at me that the only two people who remarked on my humor or wit were two old high school friends, one of whom was the friend who tried to console me over that A-. the three of us reconnected at Facebook about 1-1/2 years ago and write to each other a couple of times a week there, so my humor is on display for them on a regular basis. in Mondo Beyondo we were asked to do an exercise to come up with our core values. humor is one of mine. that secret performing life i kept as a child? a big part of it was practicing my stand-up and impersonations. i live for humor, yet i'll bet most people who read here would be surprised to learn that. i don't often display my humor here because when i've tried to do that in the past (on any of my blogs), it's often been misinterpreted. so i keep that part of myself offline for the most part.
it's only just now occurred to me that Miss M not only snatched away my dream of writing, she may have also snatched away my dream of humor because the thing i loved most about that essay i'd written was its humor. the other day i read a post by Martha Beck, 20 questions that could change your life. number 10 stopped me in my tracks: "What's so funny?"
people are surprised when i say that i never had a teacher along the way who inspired me. the response is usually: well, surely there must have been one...? no. i had a lot of adults along the way tell me what i couldn't do and often what i should do, according to their beliefs and/or their perception of me. i think that's why sometimes i feel bothered by some things i've seen emerge in the blogosphere over the years. do we take on certain likes, activities and pursuits because they're really what we desire, or do we adopt them to fit in? do we choose our tribe, or do we let our tribe choose us?
the #1 question in that list of 20 from Martha Beck? "What questions should I be asking myself?" i guess i just answered that.
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