“Do you believe in yourself?” asked Bernardo.
I paused a moment as the sun set over the valley, “I don’t think so. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do here…in Valle I mean.”
He looked at me with dark growing eyes, “Well hurry up. The world needs you.”
self-portrait while moving in a pandemic
Last year at this time snow covered the ground and Woodbine Park’s pond was frozen over. Parents cleared the ice with shovels and carried their kids in snowsuits to benches, laced up their skates. Children laughed loudly, drowning out sticks slapping the ice. Sand and layers of crusty snow protruded into the lake forming inlets of slushy water. A sparkle settled over everything.
This didn’t ensure we’d have a good year. It was not foreshadowing for what was ahead. It was simply a snowy January full of forts and soggy mitts drying out on radiators. What followed was a year with highs and lows like every other. Some lows worse, I must admit, and some of my highs didn’t quite match the mournful parts but I had a steady stream of love, decadent dinners, small trips, literary friends in the form of books and the consistency of cat cuddles to colour my days. When I reflected back on 2022 I saw my life stretched out, a painting on canvas, and the traumas were smudges and smears, large brushstrokes of darker shades in a corner here, or a smaller mark there. They were not the entire painting. They were texture and layers within the colourful, intimate image of my life. Some swooshes seemed to appear with movement from past years, while others were entirely new, almost neon in tone. In my mind, the brushstrokes appeared as if Jenna Gribbon were painting them and Maria Berrio set the images down in her complex collage style. Time travel was evident from one corner of the painting to another.
This January has mostly been grey and dark and damp. More like November never ended. If the air weren’t cold, I’d be fooled to think it was spring, brown world, muddy ground, herbs still green under slush. Until today. Snow. Big fluffy flakes. Icicles dangling like teeth from eavestroughs. I smiled to have something different. As I look this over now pale sun filters through my skylights, dyes the white mounds lilac and rose, casting a cool glow over everything. Outside undisturbed heaps lie atop tree branches, mailboxes and car mirrors.
I like the snow now. Have learned to like it. I didn’t always like the cold. The ice. As someone who was averse to the winter months and had plans to move to California someday to escape, I took it upon myself last year to start cold dipping in Lake Ontario. I need the water. I am more fish than woman sometimes. A Selkie history perhaps. My first plunge felt like daggers against my skin, breath gone on the wind, limbs shaking, shivering uncontrollably. The buzz of the thaw though heightened all my senses, awakened me to life in ways warmth didn’t. By my second dip I was hooked. I try to go weekly, often at sunrise because I like watching the fiery globe lift above the horizon, how it lights up the dawn while my breath forms clouds. Wild swimming in frigid open waters is my way of being close to the earth in months with frozen ground, where nothing is soft.
I am not going to prove how valuable my year was, how much progress I made in life or evolution as a human being. I’m not sure there was any form of a new me, which took shape. No closer to my essence than I was in childhood. I read the short story Birthmark by Miranda July and then read it again. I finished her collection earlier this month, which I should have read in my twenties. Last summer, when I was in Manhattan with my partner, I picked up July’s bright banana yellow copy in Strand. I love her absurdist humour and the awkward discomfort she’s able to generate through her narratives yet still imbue tenderness. The two characters in Birthmark are unsure, insecure of their love, because they found each other later in life, after the stains of their earlier lives were erased. In the case of the protagonist, she lasered her port-wine-stain, erased it from one whole cheek. Her right cheek. It was almost half her face—the stain. She had it removed long before she met her love.
The protagonist was both “ugly and too lovely to bear,” depending on the angle at which she was looked at. After the laser work she was free to begin the stage of her life where she was “beautiful, except for nothing,” which of course didn’t last because she was aware of the lack of ugly, the lack of her story.
July writes, “Over time she knew more and more people who had never seen her with the birthmark. These people didn’t feel any haunting absence, why should they. Her husband was one of these people.” She married someone who never knew her with her port-wine-stain and because of that, when she saw a couple loving each other, one with a port-wine stain and one without, she resented her relationship. She felt their love wasn’t big enough to hold such ugliness.
Until the moment when there was red everywhere and the stain reappeared from her right eye to her jawbone in a purplish red. To which her husband responded by falling to his knees for fear she would not let him love her this way.
All I kept thinking about was the recreation of self. Sometimes it’s to help transformation along without losing oneself. Then I wondered if that’s even possible. I thought of Jungian shadows and the ways relationships can get tangled up in empty rooms and lost conversations, ego-projections instead of sincerity. I considered friendships that have been through many iterations of the self and still continue despite ongoing becoming. Then there are those relationships that form later, once the reinvention has taken shape and the new identity in place, where there’s the feeling of being known and not known at the same time. There are also friendships that don’t make it through transformation; ones where they only want to see a person as they were and not as they are now. Is there room for the old and recreated self? Or is there only self? The story has stayed with me—the brevity of it, the warmth, the haunting quality. I liked it.
Originally published in the Paris Review but there’s a pay wall now. You can read it for free here.
I was hoping to look back on the year and have a Top Ten Book list to offer you. Instead I have snippets of thoughts and books I enjoyed. I’m not even sure I read ten new books last year as I spent most of my time observing, writing, with friends, flowers, sitting under stars or on rocks, making fires, swimming in lakes and rivers, collecting debris and feathers from The Spit. I filled myself with elemental knowledge. I reread older books I love: Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, Just Kids by Patti Smith, Felicity by Mary Oliver, How Should A Person Be by Sheila Heti, All We Saw by Anne Micheals.
In May, I graduated and received an MFA in creative nonfiction. A very joyous time. Proud parents and relieved friends. If you want to work on a manuscript and become part of an incredible community of writers, I can’t recommend it enough. I travelled to Halifax, ate lots of seafood and celebrated every night. From June on, I worked with florists I know (and adore), designed and planted gardens. My world became external, always moving, making with my hands more than my head, which felt good after two-years of study. My body was ready to lift heavy buckets, rig-up botanical orbs (or work my personal-life shit out on snake art, thanks Jo:), sculpt large pieces and dig my hands in the dirt. I couldn’t sit solitary at the desk. I had to touch the earth, feel the flowers, their velvet petals.
Books became something I picked up in transit or at the beach. Reading an excerpt here or there. Having room for the economy of a poem. There were many books I began and didn’t finish. Permission to stop reading—a gift I gave myself. The books I did read though connect to the season I read them in: that book where the cover is stained from melted snow, another for the fertility of spring, the swimming months were all about friendship and selfhood, and when the trees turned gold every word was on love and desire.
Writing became something I did anywhere I could. I wrote in bars, on beaches, at my desk, in bed, at my friend’s dining room table, on my parent’s couch, in cafes, on the streetcar, on the train, on a plane. It was not time I carved out perfectly where I was disciplined enough to write so many words a day, for so many hours. The only rule was: work wherever you are. This writing was more of a rewriting as I’m officially in the revision phase. I don’t know what’s ahead or how long it will take me. I found myself plagued with shame because I hadn’t found my way in the literary community post-grad (whatever that means) and instead was writing on the go to a design job downtown, or in slivers and slits of time between installing hanging installations and gardens. editing other’s work.
Editing is rewriting as David Grann eloquently put it in a lecture at King’s winter residency a couple weeks ago. The fear that editing will take the life out of writing isn’t true. With editing more of the narrator is saturated within the text whereas revision is much more substantive, it’s about shaping something. Plotting. My way of dealing with the fear of losing the life-force of a fresh piece is saving it as an original, then seeing how the piece evolves with each draft. Comparing it to the way the words were arranged to begin with. If I’ve overdone it. I go back.
All month one of my life quotes has been rolling around my head. A quote I return to every now and then. The first time I read this quote I was fourteen, in grade 9, writing an essay on Martha Graham for dance class. Martha—the mother of modern dance. Her style and technique reshaped contemporary movement. In those years, the ones of my youth, my parents attended a very religious church where dancing was seen as a sin. I argued church leaders and took elders on in debate as a scrawny pre-teen and when words weren’t heard, I began using my body to make my point clear. I danced. And danced. And danced some more. Movement to music was electric to me.
For my essay I signed Agnes De Mille’s The Life and Work of Martha Graham out of the library. Studying Martha was like opening a window in a room of locked doors. She had already died by the time I discovered her work and yet there I was skipping class to pour over the pages of her choreography. I became obsessed with her subversive ideas. I felt akin to her spirit. It was like this with Isadora Duncan too. They became guides and muses.
While studying Graham, I came across her famous quote,
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Keep the channel open, and then you do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware, and then later this again, keep the channel open.
The instruction doesn’t include self-belief or knowing entirely what you’re doing with your work. It comes with being aware of the urges that motivate and to look for divine dissatisfaction and blessed unrest. To be comforted by not having to believe in your work, or yourself because most days fall somewhere on a spectrum between self-doubt and belief. It seems what matters is staying open to life, aware of self, motivations, and nudges towards vitality while recognizing the stirring restlessness experienced along the way is quite normal. It’s part of this life force, this quickening.
Books I Enjoyed In 2022:
Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux
Good Girl by Anna Fitzpatrick
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Funny Weather: Art In An Emergency by Olivia Laing
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
The Carrying by Ada Limon
Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty by Bahar Orang
(It turns out I did read ten books)
How to see your life as a painting in a year:
Light a candle
Get a pot of tea or carafe of coffee. Pick your favourite pug, Put it on a side table and pour a cup. Drink.
Open a notebook. Use your phone to go scroll images you took in each month. Write point form notes about the year from January-December based on the emotions and memories the images evoke. Note varied things you found amusing, sad, beautiful, worth celebrating, laughing or crying at.
Not everything will exist there, and that’s okay. There will be people and moments missing. Note those gaps too.
By the end of this you will have a painting of the year in your mind. Not single events but thoughts. A whole strip of moments layered together by images and your remembering.
Perhaps what you see will be more textured, more vibrant, more open to the channel.