Open Now
Another Self-Portrait
I just took the hottest bath of my life, and it felt so good and so necessary. I turned the water as hot as I could stand it. Then I sat in the empty tub and let it slowly fill, watching my skin turn bright red from the tips of my toes up to my stomach. I sunk into the tub, put my head under the hot water, and felt myself quietly recede into liquid.
It wasn’t my intention.
My intention was to come home and finish writing my movie review of Last Train Home, but some things happened, a train of thought, a train of experiences, a whole year in some ways, that made me think that I need to stop and write something else.
Let me see how I can say this.
I’ve been a little distant lately. It’s been building for quite a while, this distance, and now I’m trying to find my way back or maybe trying to find my way to a new place. The old place is old. Or maybe I just need to find a new way of looking at the old place.
I’ve been very busy for over a year doing something that I really needed to do in my life. I have been having a relationship with myself. I have spent my entire life living under the reflection of myself in others, and for once I have been strong enough or mature enough or old enough or something enough to let go of the need to feel attached to someone to validate me and make me feel like I somehow have worth and value. I have found the worth and value inside myself, which means that first of all I had to try to figure out who the hell I am. I haven’t answered that yet, but I have had quite a journey stripping down the layers of walls that have kept me from myself.
I have spent more than a year getting to know myself on new terms, terms that aren’t reflections of myself in someone else’s eyes. It means that sometimes I just need to disconnect, pull the plug, climb under the covers, lie in the dark and feel who I am in the empty dark night. It means that I have to pause and enjoy life in the exact moment I’m living it and feel myself living it, taking those moments for what they are, experience them, live them and move along to the next moment.
Insomuch as it is possible to be alone while being a working full time mom, I have spent the last year alone, very focused on being inside of me, getting to know me, and trying to see if I could find out who this person is under all these layers of experiences and programming and performance identities that have kept me insulated from myself for my entire life. Who is the person under all the walls I have built around myself to survive? I can’t really answer that, but I can tell you a few things.
When I put my art in Solar Culture, I broke my year of solitude and went out into the world of people. I really went out on a limb by putting myself out there in my most vulnerable guise - my art. But I felt like I needed to do it. I still think I needed to do it.
I met someone at the show, and I really liked this person very much. I was so happy to meet someone who liked my art and who seemed so enthusiastic about my energy and who I am. But the problem is that I am unaccustomed to being out in the world of people. For all my experience in life, in some ways I’m just a naïve idiot. I was so happy to meet this person and know this person that I decided I wanted to share some of my writing with him, so I sent him the videos of my reading at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. I didn’t even think about the content of the reading. I didn’t even think about what I was thinking (because I obviously wasn’t thinking). I just wanted to share this thing I did that was important to me in my life. After I sent the links to those videos, I basically never heard from this person again. Without explanation, he just shut the door and shut me out of his life. Here one day. Gone the next. It was brutal, painful, and hard. It brought up a whole history of hurt inside me, and it left me paralyzed for nearly three weeks. I’m over it.
I took some advice from a friend and decided to take the initiative to meet some of the other artists from the show. I have met another friend in Tucson. Someone I like very much as a person, as a friend, as an artist. But it is amazing how gun shy I am with him. The first time we got together, I didn’t talk much about myself and my writing and my creative projects. We spent the afternoon walking around downtown Tucson taking photographs and talking. It was refreshing to meet someone who only knew me for the woman who has art hanging in Solar Culture. No Kim Dot Dammit. No memoir writing. No poetry performance drunk demon girl. I was just a person in the moment.
Sure bits and pieces came out about my life and his life. We have a lot of common experiences, but I didn’t deliver the pieces of my life as crafted stories or as performances. They were just facts revealed in the course of conversation.
Eventually I brought up the subject of the person I met at the show and how I think that the videos of my reading at City Lights made him shut the door on me. My new friend asked if he could see the videos, and I said that I didn’t want to show them to him yet. I was very reluctant. I didn’t want his opinion of me to be biased by a reading of a story I wrote. Since then, we’ve corresponded, and we spent another great afternoon together yesterday. He asked again if he could see the videos. I wasn’t sure.
So today, I decided to watch the videos of my reading. I sat watching myself recite that story - Veal Scaloppini - and I was utterly mortified that I had sent the videos to my other friend, the one who shut the door in my face. I mean, as the person who wrote the story and the person who lived through the events that are told in the story, I have never really sat back and looked at myself and heard my words through someone else’s eyes and ears. I did that today. I watched myself read as if I wasn’t myself but someone who just met me and didn’t know much about me. The truth of the matter is that the story is, on many levels, graphic and ugly. It would push anyone away. If only I had thought to look at it through someone else’s eyes before. What was I thinking showing that to someone who barely even knew me? How could he not shut the door in my face if that is what he sees? Wouldn’t I want to shut the door in my face if I wasn’t me?
It was tough watching my reading today. I realized how much strength, how much of a wall, how much brick and mortar performance paste I have to apply to myself to write and deliver such a thing. And right now, honestly, I am not in a brick and mortar state of mind. I am so fucking tired of bricks and mortar. My first thought was to delete the videos so no one could watch them again. I then made the decision that I am forever done with my memoir writing. I no longer want to be identified as that person. These, of course, were rash decisions made in the moment. In all honesty, I have no idea what I’m going to do.
I called my good friend in the Bay Area and told him how I was feeling about the video. He was at the reading in City Lights, and he loved my reading. He said that what he sees and hears is a woman who has lived through some stuff and has the “talent” and “guts” to tell the story and that perhaps my story speaks to other people.
I told him that I am sick of being the woman who has the guts to tell the story. It’s so hard to be that woman. I said that I don’t want my new friend to see me in that light. That I just want to be the person I am who is so many different things. I want him to know me for all these other things before his perception of me is tainted by my stories.
My Bay Area friend said that he’s sure my new friend can tell the difference between a story and a person. I said that I hope so, but certainly the vast majority of my experience has been that people can’t tell the difference. They read my stories and then I become that. This thing that I have created out of the detritus of a life that happened a long time ago. I’m tired of being judged by the things I write. I’m tired of being a composite of my stories.
Anyway, eventually I ended up sending my new friend the video. I don’t know what he’ll think of it. Maybe it will be a huge letdown and disappointment after all the brouhaha.
So much has surfaced inside of me during this past month and this whole experience. I have lived so long with my history and my life and have written it out in so many words, that I just take it for granted. I figure it’s no big deal. But then today when I watched myself read those words and say those things and tell those stories, I was kind of sickened by myself especially as I felt again that door that was shut on me for telling my story.
I think this all goes back to my Postcards From My Past experience this past July. Once I made that trip into the real streets of my life, there was no denying that the stories I have written actually happened to me. Sure I have turned them into words on the page, but somewhere deep inside this body, I know it was me who is inside those stories. But I don’t want them to define me. I have so many more things inside me. Good things. Beautiful things. Powerful things. Quiet things. Loud things. I am so much more than the stories of my past. I have so much to offer. I like who I am.
Certainly after the shut door experience, my inclination was to go back into hiding. I am not ready for the world, and the world is not ready for me. But I didn’t do it. I have stepped outside into the world, and I like being out there, but I am also being very wary. I was reminded that people can hurt you on the drop of a dime, and that I have to remember to keep my guard up, even though right now I really want to let it down.
I did let it down for a while yesterday. I stood on a sidewalk in the cool November air, and I felt my wall come down for a window of time. It felt so good in that moment. But the rails are back up now. I’ll see what happens.
This whole thing brings up yet again the burden I carry for being this construction that I have made of myself. How can I expect other people to know me if I don’t even know myself? When I was walking through a grove of trees with my new friend yesterday, he asked me some things about myself, and I answered them. But then I thought about it, and I said, “I have no idea really. I’m not sure who I am.” Because that’s just it. I spent over a year by myself, inside my head, and I really tried to shut out outside influences on my perceptions of myself. That’s where all this art I have been making comes into place. It takes me inside myself and lets me see through my eyes and feel what it’s like to be me looking out at and experiencing the world. Now I’ve reached this nugget of me, and I am torn. I want people, someone, to see the me who is underneath all the performance, but I also know that if I do let that person out, it is very likely that her fingers will get broken when that door is shut on her.
Still, as painful as this whole past month has been, it has served a purpose in my life. It helped me shed some really awful stuff inside me that I didn’t even know was there. And when I came out through the other side after an interminable three weeks of hurt, I realized that I like who I am. I’m about a thousand times more vulnerable now, but I can accept that. I like how it makes me feel, but I also know that it means that I am really not sure where the hell I’m going to go with my “public” writing other than writing about movies or, perhaps, writing something like this.
So going back to that hot bath, I realized as I sat down to write these reflections tonight that I really couldn’t do it until I stripped the day off my body, had a moment to immerse myself in hot water, and feel myself for who I am, this woman who occupies this body. I told my new friend yesterday, “I am beautiful. I am smart. I am funny. And I love life. Now I just have to figure out what the hell to do with myself.” I know one thing for sure. I’m going to keep making art. And I’m not going to shut the door on myself. It’s open now. But please knock before stepping inside.