Almost a year later after writing “Looking for Daddy”, which I am currently working into a memoire, my life has changed in unmeasured ways. I am so grateful for the creative act of writing which to me continues to be one of the most important assets in the journey of life. I’m so grateful for this community of readers, writers and living poets where I get to practice my craft and share my stories. Thank you so much for reading along.
I think my dad fell into a depression when my mom divorced him. It was never spoken about, but as a child, specifically an only child who felt more comfortable with trees than humans, I learned to attune to the unspoken wavelengths of my parents inner world. Perhaps, waves on their ocean they themselves were unaware off.
My dad and I lived in a summerhouse, in an area that was hollowing dead in the winter and intensely alive during the summer. Much like my dad himself. Living in a seasonal community all year round fosters a kind of isolation that could also be called minimal inputs for creative freedom and a kind of feral nature in children.
Our house was chaotically colourful, as was the unorganised art on the yellow walls. Every inch of the house had an heirloom, a token, a picture, a note, a quote, or a dried flower attached to it. The house was a contradiction to the state of my father at times. And at other times, a perfection representation of him. An extension even.
As for me, I was the space in between. It seemed like I took up all the space. It was after all my pictures, my face, my paintings, my drawing of “The Lion and The Princess ca. 1994” on the walls but in fact, I was the little space of wall, of breath, of space in between the chaos, the colours, the memories of a story I felt barely present in. When my dad looked at me, he looked not at me, but a mirage, a long lost dream of a woman, who would not love him back.
One particular bright spring morning where the air was rich with the sweet scent of crocus, hyacinths and daffodils, I hid behind the wall in our tiny entrance, while my dad was on the phone with my mom. I am wearing new white sneakers that mom bought for me. I try to be as quiet and invisible as I possibly can. I am good at turning into a wall. The grownups called me nosy, because I always wanted to know what they were talking about. I needed to pretend to be a wall, a part of a furniture, anything really that could be a disguise for blending in and not standing out, to get the most information I needed. My curiosity was a deep desire, a need, to know what in fact was actually going on, since no one really seemed to be telling me truth. The kind of truth that I felt through the entirety of my 120 cm. long body.
Dad hangs up the phone, and even though he is dressed in colours, a green polo shirt and red pants, his darkness seem eternal. Like the quicksand I’m so terrified of slipping into on the long bleak beaches or in the forest. Dad feels like quicksand and I hold on tight to the wall to not get sucked in when I ask:
“Are you sad, dad?”
“No,” And he lights a cigarette. White kings, no filter, and turns on the kettle to make a cup of tea. I can tell he is lying.
For the most of my childhood I have had the same reoccurring nightmare. I’m at a Medieval Fair in a beautiful valley. Fairies are encaged, and the smell of roasted pork is vivid, even in dreams. From the top of the hill an army lead by a Dark Knight attack the fair, and I escape with a squire and a monk. I hide in the forest, in churches and in a stable. I see the reflection of the Dark Knight in the lake. I wake up before he finds me.
I don’t remember when I was happy and I don’t remember when I started to self implode, and I don’t remember exactly when I felt like my happy was too big or in the way of a much greater sadness. I don’t think I woke up one morning feeling like my joy was a thorn to the heart of the grownups around me who suffered. It was a slow, stale process when I started feeling like my excitement was a dread, an irritation — something to be dismissive and tense about. It happened in conversations where I hid behind walls. Listening in made me not only aware, but adaptable to the lack of oxygen in the room and how I, like a Master of Energy, could make energy move more smoothly. Not to agitate, not to activate, not to irritate.
By nature, in nature, I felt the most comfortable, joyous on my own. There was something about pressing my body hard into the tree, hearing its heart beat under mine; the way the branches tenderly held my bare feet as I climbed it. My velocity, my excitement, was never too much for the tree. The tree never tried calming me down. The tree told me to go as far as I possibly could. All the way to the top.
I would press my entire body into the grass, and the grass never swallowed me but held me, carefully. The grass didn’t mind me reaching for more beneath the soil.
I established a kind of kinship with butterflies. I picked them up from our Butterfly Bush, careful not to touch their wings, and told them while they sat on my finger, that they didn’t have to be scared. That they could trust me. At first what struck me was their apparent etheric beauty. Colours and patterns interwoven with such sensitivity and flight. The knowingness that even though I too was small, I could easily crush them with my two fingers if I wanted to. That was my first lesson about power. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you have to. And if you may assert your power, do so, not to destroy beauty, but to cultivate, nurture and create beauty.
The peculiar thing about butterflies was that once you got close enough, beyond the beauty of some seemingly divine tapestry, you’d notice that they in fact were bug-eyed and kind of ugly. Some sort of weird friction stirred up in me. These delicate, beautiful beings, who possessed a certain nauseating qualities, so seemingly contradictory to their grace. I loved them anyways.
Sometimes the air in the house was stale and simply just sad. Thick with grief. Nothing seemed to move. The only solace I found was in books and like a receding wave, I pulled in on myself.
The tapes of my childhood reveal to me that there is more to me than I’d like to remember. When I look at tapes of myself as a child I take a greater liking to the one who is shy, withdrawn and observant than to the one dressed in all yellow, and who confidently goofs around in the front of the camera. Or like the 3 year old who interrupts a live interview while wearing a watch because she is bored backstage. I am even perhaps, terrified of my own feral nucleus power? “Calm down,” I say. I like the story better of the introverted, sensitive girl, because a part of me still doesn’t quite believe that I am big enough to reside in both. Dynamically alive. I’m often surprised when I look at tapes of myself as a child. Feisty, assertive, confident, funny and joyous. This is not what I remember.
And perhaps this is exactly the seed of the story when we say that we have forgotten who we are?
When I started modelling, I landed in an industry that loved the girl dressed in all yellow and who were not afraid of being loud and funny. I thought it was superficial. Of course a superficial industry would take a liking to something as superficial as excitement. I always excused my behaviour as a professional role. That I, in fact was much more quiet and aloof in real life. I wore it as an badge of honour. Simply because of the same belief that the two — night and day, sun and the moon, could not co-exist as one and the same.
In recent months, as a result of a decade of inventory and emotional maturity, I have more than ever untangled myself from the shores of environment I possess and pass through. The less I try to grasp onto a singular emotion caused by an inner state or as a respond to a wavelength of another, the freer I grow. The endless labelling of who were are based on our emotional landscape, which is vast and always moving, is perhaps the first conditioning we face as human beings. How could we possibly ever fit our immensity into a constricted and confined label. You can be sensitive and loud. You can be shy and excited. You can be joyous and sad. Truth is, you most likely are. It all.
It is my own experience that when we stop rejecting who we are, there is freedom from the known. This freedom cultivates a space for a the meeting of who we truly are. The mind has to fall apart, for the heart to fall into place.
I look at my story differently now. I tell it different. I no longer perceive myself as a victim. I am human born into conditions and circumstances like we all are in each our own iterations. It has been heartbreakingly beautiful, raw, sad, wild and real. I leave this old filter behind courageously, but not fearlessly. To stand in my visceral love for life, with gratitude and excitement is perhaps even more vulnerable than grief to me. I have gotten to learn a new, true and deep part of myself as my inner world has changed. When I lift the veil of that little girl who I deemed broken and fragile because of her profound sensitive nature, I see a girl who is probably the strongest girl I have ever known? Not strong measured in her ability to be stern and unbothered, but strong because of her ability to let life move her into unknown territories. For her gentleness with the butterflies, and her kinship with the trees. For her willingness to remember who she is. For her reclamation of who she truly is — no matter how little sense it makes to the mind. She is brave enough to not break, but to break open and to continue to find herself truer and bigger than she was yesterday. And she, who is me, is brave enough to share this with the world.
There is great liberation in knowing that though I at one point was attached and entangled in a sick mans mind; a mirror to his soul, a wave of his ocean — I am my own person now. I looked at the ocean and I decided to explore a new shore, a new reflection and a new wavelength to not only respond to but to perceive through. I see the girl I once was, I need not the world to see her, to give her permission to be here in her full expression, because she is expressed through me.
I have grown ferocious in my determination to love life as wholly and holy as I possible can. And I am devoted to not live life as a wall, but as an entire universe, beaming.