[That slip again! I live in it. And sassy, out-of-character Belle by Sigerson Morrison shoes. Stopping by to visit the Bo for post-work libations. Definitely not cocoon sweater weather here in RVA, but that’s what air conditioning bills are for.]
Remember No-Face? In an inspiring animé film about a brave little girl defying the odds alongside a hot dude who turns into a dragon, I picked maybe the weirdest character to identify with:
No-Face (カオナシ kaonashi, lit. “faceless”) is a spirit. He is shown to be capable of reacting to emotions and ingesting other individuals to gain their personality and physical traits. No-Face first appeared a very timid and soft-spoken spirit whose vocabulary consisted of grunts and moans as opposed to understandable words. Not knowing much about The Bathhouse or about other spirits in general, No-Face learned by example.
Exposed to the corruptive thoughts and greed of the workers, he quickly grew to encompass their personalities, hoping that his endeavor to be like those around Chihiro would eventually garner her affection for him. This ultimately brought the opposite effect.
No-Face seems to reflect his surroundings in personality. It is the corruption and negative thoughts of The Bathhouse that have made him a dangerous monster.” – Spirited Away wiki description of No-Face.
Like most other things, I absorbed some notion of creativity early on.
Creativity was something some kids had and some didn’t—or didn’t care about. Like, “You’re going to be tall like your father, I can tell,” but pointing inherent talent out took tact. It was charming. Creativity made people smile. And lastly, creativity didn’t have to be deep. It was about fun.
It seems counterproductive to start poking around for a rejection of creativity this far back—I mean, it’s kind of irrelevant. We had no bills then, no jobs, no one with the heart to tell us we sucked, and yet hours were carved out of the day specifically for pasting things on other things—but I have a good reason: that’s when the playing field was level. Any of us could have decided to be anything.
When I look at the book again, it strikes me how naive I am—“WHY NOT ME?!”—when writers, makers, musicians… they spent years honing the right to be on these pages. This isn’t frivolity, it’s dedication. I can barely use a hot glue gun. They had to start somewhere; the key is they didn’t give up.
[NOT my best work.]
There are hints in the earliest memories that I could have gone hard after something. I’m going to say I was either too stubborn, too distractible, or too anxious, but I certainly had a fair shot.
Something happens somewhere in growing up where you become acutely aware of the need to survive. Or the benefit of being prepared. Maybe that’s the key, and maybe that’s my answer.
During grade school, I dug that certain things came easy to me. I had smarty pants friends, sporty friends, leader friends, performer friends, and influencer friends. I just liked making stuff, and making people laugh. Art was fun, but I assumed teachers who told me I should pursue it outside of school were blowing smoke.
My earliest artistic memory is of taking this dreamy after-school art class in a tiny shack in Jacksonville Beach with my friend Marjorie, an actual real-deal, going-to-change-the-scene kind of artist. [Once, in kindergarten, she took me into her front yard and showed me a slab of cement in the grass. “That’s my tomb. I’m buried there. What you’re talking to right now is just my spirit,” and other kinds of magic brilliance.] I could appreciate that she was totally cosmic and out there and it wasn’t a threat yet.
I mostly just liked that you could make beautiful things while listening to music and talking.
I was good at composition—randomly arranging things in a pleasing way. Something about my not over-thinking things; an instinct I followed. It was the most sophisticated compliment I’ve ever received.
Even at that age, you have a good bullshit monitor. And I knew certain compliments about my art weren’t bullshit. But bonafide creative pride was reserved for weirder things: things like designing obstacle courses around the house, committing them to memory, then running upstairs and drawing them up like blueprints. Or ad libbing some amazing dialogue in my friend’s brother’s home productions and tapings of the Sally Jesse Raphael show. (I played all the sub-normal, deviant guests.)
I’ve always valued these little anecdotes (mine and yours) over accomplishments. Weird over talent. Maybe I’m just confusing nonconformity for creativity?
In any event: good at composition, but without clear direction of how to apply it, I lost interest.
And writing. Writing was the best! I flunked a debate once. Afterward, the teacher said “Had it been writing not speaking, you’d have done better.” OK, then. I didn’t mind writing papers one bit. What I loved writing, though, were not up for grades: filthy short stories. I still have an entire binder of risqué comic strips I drew about all my crushes—stick figure drawings called “Happy Trails.” But when I went to a college with a spectacular creative writing program, I chose to major in political science. [Sad trombone. More on that later.]
Even choir was fun. I loved singing, learning arrangements, harmonizing. Again, though, more fun were the extra-curricular versions: improvising lyrics about fellatio to John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town” to a group of giggling 5th graders.
And public speaking—dudes, they’d pick me to announce the headmistress to the stage during school assemblies, or to lead the Sunday service in front of all of Richmond’s 2%-ers at church for my confirmation. “Please be seated. Turn to page 325 in the Book of Common prayer,” recited into my tiny clip-on chest mic, my voice booming around inside the ears of CEOs and lawyers and future CEOs and future lawyers. As resigned to those moments as I was, I recall one weird-tasting bonus: Power. A tiny thrill.
I tickled the ivories after school through high school, but I had a bad habit of playing by ear instead of reading notes. After a few years of trying to hammer that out of me, I eventually quit. Jazz and ballet classes (The Richmond Ballet being a little much for my anti-authoritarian proclivities) led to bright lights and recitals, and my never believing my mom when she said I had composure beyond my years up there on stage. I was too shy for theater, so it seemed pointless.
Because something nagged at me: if this isn’t hard, it’s not admirable. If it’s fun, it’s not worth anything.
No one told me that, either. I came up with that all on my own.
Fun is like the beginning and end point on the creative life cycle. And the opposite of fun is fear.
What’s charming in a 4th grader suddenly needs to be qualified with skill and measurable talent in a 7th grader. For me, though, it was more simple than that. It was an inability to ignore impending doom: popularity, social land mines, sports, young men, and competitive-level academic classes. It’s easy to assign importance to things you fear. So, these things became important to me.
I had creative friends, but I should have had more. I watched my friend Lizzie dance during a rehearsal with otherworldly cool confidence in 8th grade. It was both captivating and revealing. While her gaze rested somewhere on the back wall over our heads, I said to my teacher, without taking my eyes off of the stage, “She makes it look so easy,” and my teacher said, “That’s because she was born to do it.” As No-Face, I could have absorbed some of Lizzie on stage, or I could absorb the self-aware audience who just saw something they weren’t as good at.
I No-Faced the crowd, naturally. For the same reason I wore Sebagos.
Is the onus on educators? I’m not sure. My instinct is no, because no teacher can effectively turn the tides of classroom politics or mitigate the castes within them. I speak only from my experience, but if arts aren’t cool, little flames get snuffed out. More so, I can’t reconcile arts and practical balance you can’t live without for the same boring, hard-nosed reasons I am who I am politically. I’m the kind to opine the importance of teaching kids, oh I don’t know, how credit card debt works over how papier mâché does, but you can’t have one without the other. How do you ensure one doesn’t eclipse the other? It’s like seeing how long you can stand on one foot.
Back to survival, I suppose it depends on the kid. And what you need to survive. And don’t we all need different things? A good education, practical knowledge, yes, but also, maybe… a firmer understanding of who we are (thank you, art) with the idea that it might—just might—be enough to get us through the hard times ahead. Turn creativity to happiness; just add water. That kind of thing.
Success while still managing to have an excellent time became my new direction. Blending in. Driven increasingly by a set of ideals that came from outside of me, not inside. I just can’t recall when you couldn’t tell the two apart. Hashtag relatable.
I didn’t know what I was born to do, but from then on out, I wanted the compliments that came against all odds.
I think those are called ‘dreams,’ but for me, they doubled as my love/hate with creativity.
Q: What were your favorite things to do? Could you still be doing them today in some capacity? Are you?
Get caught up with Part 1 here.
A month or so ago, this eccentric, 6ft tall, pink lipsticked, curly gray haired French woman came flouncing into the shop, talking about….I’m not sure why I felt the need to come in here but something pulled me in. She said “Are you creatively fulfilled?” I said, yeah I mean, I guess so? I make things all the time and I shop for clothes for a living. She said…your aura is creative and while I get the sense you enjoy your work here, there’s something missing. She went on to ask me if I was an artist, a writer, a singer, a musician (no, sort of?, no, no) and told me there was something else I “needed to be doing creatively”. It was weird! And it was disconcerting and shook me up for a few days. I do wish I were writing more often/still involved in the art world somehow and her visit made me think about it more…so maybe I will! Well, I’m not sure what the point of all that was except to say that I feel you. Ok, byeeeee
that is amazing! Insanity! You need to find that lady and buy her a drink!