Reflecting on a Year and Change
The month of March is always bursting with change and reflection. It’s the month I got married seven years ago, the month the pandemic and lockdown happened, and a year ago, the month I left a secure job without my next plan. My body seems to consistently react to the change in season. Allergies worsen, I pull a back muscle, and I develop an infection and need antibiotics. Things that have laid dormant in my body begin making themselves known. They are ready to erupt, and I need to tend to them.
It’s a season of transitions; some are easy, and others are like a deep and invasive weeding that leaves you a bit sweaty and sore. Still, I eagerly anticipate its arrival every year and whatever it may bring. It’s a month of changes within myself and the world accompanied by shifting seasons. Anything that died or went dormant in the Winter begins bursting from soil that needs turning; roses in my front yard are budding, and I get an itch to start adding color to the yard with the threat of a cold snap out of the way. I’m reflective, not idealizing the past completely but looking back on other Marches and the significant life shifts they brought.
A year ago, I left a job I loved but was not content with. It was a necessary step forward that I was too scared to take. When I finally stepped away, life seemed to open up, and I quickly found a new job. But like most things I rush into, I quickly realized I was not in the right place. I burned out quickly and was part of a mass layoff three months after starting. In six months, I had experienced too many ups and downs and realized so much of my self-worth was concentrated and dependent on a job when I was still unhappy in life and struggling with my mental health.
A year on has had me reflecting. I am not in a place I had ever imagined for myself a year ago. I don’t have a “career” in the traditional sense. I now call myself a freelancer who dabbles in multiple areas. I will be teaching at a craft camp this summer with a wonderful museum here in Houston. I work part-time for an independent bookstore, and I’m writing here. Nothing is consistent, and I’m learning to lean into the uncertain parts of life and to be gentler with myself.
I’m learning more about my mental health and what life looks like as someone with OCPD (Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder) and OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), and the ways both conditions affect my ability to work traditionally along with chronic pain, more on that another time. Life doesn’t look the way I thought a successful individual’s life would look at nearly 34, but I’ve come a long way in a year of accepting that the things I want, the things that genuinely make me content and excited in life, do not look the way I believed they needed to.
Things I'm Thinking About
I’ve been thinking about how to start writing about life's more painful parts, not trauma necessarily, although I'm sure that is impossible to avoid. I'm thinking about the briefly mentioned things within our writing. Like a pothole in the road of your brain's thinking, it catches, and memories knock loose from the road; they aren't always pretty, but that is where the beauty of life lies, the deep stuff. In an Instagram post, I referred to this as the bruises that need fingers deep inside the flesh.
Two authors that I have been thinking about and have really great things to say about writing the hard stuff are Leslie Jamison and Emily Rapp Black.
We recently drove to Austin to see Leslie Jamison read and talk about her newest memoir, Splinters. I finished reading it recently and absolutely loved it. It is an easy five-star read (review may be coming soon)!
In it, she gives this advice to her students:
In class, I spoke to my students about breaking open the anecdotal stories we all told ourselves and others about our lives. You have to uproot the cocktail-party story, I said, in order to get at the more complicated version lurking beneath it: the nostalgia under the anger, the fear beneath the ambition. I didn’t want their breakups summarized, I wanted specifics—wanted them stress-eating cookies as big as their palms, their fingers smelling like iron after leaning against an ex’s rusty fire escape.
I recently listened to a podcast called Otherppl hosted by Brad Listi. He spoke with Emily Rapp Black in an episode about craft and how to approach “truth” in creative nonfiction. A few years ago, I read Emily’s recent memoir, Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, and it lives on my all-time favorites shelf. She discussed why people often seek out nonfiction in bookstores because they are going through something personal and need or want to read about it to better understand it or maybe seek solace in someone else’s experience, to know they aren’t alone in whatever they may be going through. When and if you go into a bookstore and don’t find the book you need, then maybe you need to be the one who writes it. I’ve felt that way ever since my formal OCPD/OCD diagnosis.
Art I’m Thinking About
I posted these images on Instagram a few weeks ago and am still thinking about them. I had been entertaining the idea of using them in a piece of fiction, which I tried to start writing and somehow quickly turned into a form of nonfiction or maybe auto-fiction, but I'm not sure. I’ve never been interested in writing fiction, but I feel set on writing something incorporating these art pieces and places. Maybe I should take it as a sign to stop fighting and just write my dang essays because clearly something is trying to escape and is finding any way it can to seep into anything and everything I try to write. Either way, these images still inspire me, and I am looking for links and ways of creating a character who is equally obsessed with them that isn’t exactly me.
Another interesting observation is that I feel quite precious over these pieces. I believe they need to be reserved for eventual personal nonfiction if and when I ever see them in person, and until then, I feel they should only live within a fictitious world. Why do we feel we can only write personal narratives about the things we have actually seen with our own eyes or experienced with our own bodies? Something to think about.
Thinking About My Art Practice
Since December, I have been trying to get back into a personal art practice; I have ideas, but none feel entirely right or fully formed. I have been inspired by some older pieces I created in graduate school, most of which were experiments like this work on paper and my plastic sculptures shown below. Both mediums speak to each other and carry themes in my art and writing that I’ve never been able to escape. I know this is where I need to dig further and explore; maybe I am overthinking it and need to just do it; sometimes, that is easier said than done.
An artist whose work has been inspiring the direction I would like to explore is Rosemary Mayer. Her works on paper and fabric sculptures have been on my mind for months.
Art I’ve Seen
Art League Houston is a wonderful contemporary and community arts organization focused on highlighting artists from various backgrounds and mediums. They also offer classes for all levels of artists. I visited recently to view their new exhibition. Here are a few pieces I loved and a bit about each artist pulled from their Artist Statements.
hallowed be thy name // Krista Chalkley
"hallowed be thy name is an exhibition featuring textiles, sculpture, and mixed media installation by Chicago-based artist Krista Chalkey. Serving as a queered reimagining of a Gothic cathedral, this body of work subverts traditional motifs of Christian iconography by imbuing them with exaltations of queerness in an attempt to heal religious trauma and facilitate reparative discussions surrounding queer worth."
To read more, click here.
Visions via Riding High // Alexis Pye
"Alexis is a Houston-based artist whose practice explores the tradition of portraiture to express the Black body outside of its social constructs. Placing her subjects in leisurely, luscious, nature-rich and even fantastical settings, her works evoke, playfulness, wonder and Blackness, as well as the joys amidst adversity. Her formal strategies include an integration of mixed media within painting, including embroidery and punch-stitch needlework.
To read more, click here.
Can’t See the Forest // Renata Lucia
"An exhibition of ecological drawings, printing plates, and collagraphs that are equal parts warning, love letter, and documentation delivered in trees. The title is borrowed from the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees,” to highlight how focusing on the wrong details can lead to failure to notice what’s important as an ecological whole. Lucia strives to shift aesthetics to a wilder landscape, inspire wonder, and encourage local ecosystem conservation. As an artist, naturalist, and environmental advocate, her practice is rooted in regular engagement with her environment through plein air studies, volunteer work for local nonprofit organizations, naturalist excursions, and ecological study."
To read more, click here.
Further Reading
I came across this series from The Paris Review titled Revisited. In it, writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Highlights include…
Catherine Lacey writing about her first time visiting the Cy Twombly Gallery here in Houston.
Larissa Pham writing about Agnes Martin and the difficulty of mixing a shade of blue to match the sky, and visiting New Mexico.
Until next time!
So much food for thought! I love how you said this and can very much relate: "I’m learning to lean into the uncertain parts of life and to be gentler with myself."
I loved this piece. Thank you for writing and sharing it. As someone who is also 34, also left a job I didn't need to be in anymore last March, and also recently got diagnosed with a chronic illness (mine is polycystic ovarian syndrome), I can't tell you how hard I related to this piece and how much I appreciated getting a window into how you're using and integrating art into processing it all.