Long-Lost Whimsy
Recently, my mom had the audacity to ask me to go clear out the stuff in my old room. I mean — it's only been 24 years since I moved out. Slow down, Speed Racer.
I started the process by going through old shoeboxes. I was a sentimental kid and had a habit of hoarding keepsakes. Some were still sweet and meaningful: my grandfather's watch and pocket knife, the ring he made out of a crashed German plane in WW2, old notes, Polaroids and photo booth pictures with my friends, movie tickets. Then there were the more disturbing things like the lock of hair from my junior high boyfriend. But beneath all of those trinkets were the dusty stacks of old drawings and the writings printed out on dot matrix paper.
It reminded me of long summer days staying at Mee-Maw and Pap's house and trying to find things occupy myself. I'm an only child, so it was just me and them. I loved them dearly, but I could only watch so much TNN. That meant I frequently ended up in Pap's workshop. Amid the piles of yellowed, decades-old paperwork, glass bottles of rubber cement, and dried-out fountain pens was a black typewriter that looked to be manufactured during Prohibition. Often, I would find a clean piece of Masonic lodge letterhead and start typing. Sometimes I wrote silly short stories or poems. Occasionally I wrote funny fake articles and rubber cemented them together to make a newspaper. Pap also had a generous supply of Big Chief sketch pads, so I would look for things to draw. Maybe the taxidermied deer head on the wall. Maybe a flower on the trumpet vine. Maybe their ancient cantankerous white cat, Princess. Whatever project I decided to take on, before I knew it, the afternoon had flown by and my mom was there to pick me up.
The older I got, the more my creative output grew. In middle school, my best friend and I would use my dad's camcorder to make television shows and movies. We made some super dramatic music videos trying to emulate Wilson Phillips or Kylie Minogue. There was a stop-motion soap opera where Ken got slapped for stepping out on Barbie. I even wrote an original song for our feature-length film "The Girl and Her Dog" starring me and Skittles, my extremely tolerant shepherd mix. By the time I was 12, I'd completed a novel: a full work of historical fiction that was over 100 single-spaced pages of dot matrix paper. It was sappy and terrible and historically inaccurate, and I loved it. I continued my love affair with art as well and worked hard on making my drawings more realistic. That's why I considered it a badge of honor when my submission to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo's School Art Contest was rejected for looking too much like Clay Walker.
As I sat on my old bedroom floor leafing through one unhinged short story after another, I tried to pinpoint when and why I stopped. I haven't written a work of fiction since my college creative writing class. I only recently started drawing again because my son wanted me to draw him some superheroes.
For the last couple of decades, I've felt like the creativity that used to flow so naturally was stunted. It's like the joy of creating was beaten out of me thanks to life, trauma, adulthood. At this point, I feel like I would have to rewire my brain to make it do anything other than just write about what's going on around me. Maybe that's partially because a lot of it is stranger than fiction.
For so long it felt like creating was woven into the fabric of who I was, so to feel like it shriveled up and died felt like another insurmountable loss. But what I felt God whisper to me in that moment was that I'm still creating; It just looks different right now. I am creating art with my son (I draw a decent Spiderman). I created this blog — right down to the logo. I take a lot of photographs and edit those photographs. I've even created art projects about trauma for the purpose of recovery. Maybe the creating I'm doing now is part of the healing process. And maybe once I've done enough healing, I will reclaim some of that long-lost whimsy.
