My mum asked me to crawl out under the eaves and retrieve some boxes of my old stuff.
Fast-forward about eight hours, and Ive now relived my life from grade school through high school, on to theatre school/university, then through my days of striving and struggling in Toronto — pictures, letters, newspaper reviews, theatre programmes and posters, and a bag full of journals and notes documenting all my trysts, brainstorms, and the working notes of my play and first two novels. I even found a plaster mask of that younger self buried in that mountain of paper.
I cant help wondering what he would have thought of the 44-year-old me. I didnt get famous, but I found a good way in the world. After years of wrestling with myself and going through heartbreaks, I reached a real peace by my 40th birthday and met my husband three days later. Plus I just spent a few weeks working from my clients office, where the team and he companys owners gave my self-esteem such a boost (once again) that it feels like Ive got a million bucks in the bank. I was even given a mansion to stay in for my last week there.
So, yeah, its not what the young me pictured, but its damned good, and he was a little stupid anyway.
Yet, as I got pulled into all those journals and show-notes again, I couldnt help but also be a little impressed. Theatre was such a brilliant thing to study. Movie-stars and celebrities, yeah, make fun of them all you like, but working in theatre is real art. Or science, even, since thats about making a stroke of luck repeatable. I cant think of any better education I could have had in art and life all at once.
Studying acting was a deep, weird, gut-wrenching couple of years. Then and after, I was always falling in love with someone, too, which both fed the work and got in the way (its hard to be honest with an audience of hundreds when you cant be honest with your one self). But theres a kind of fondness to the melancholy ache of those memories. You were young, you were sexy, you were free!
Yeah, but not really. I didnt know things would work out. I was dirt-poor. Those hand-made greeting cards I found in the bag? I came up with those when I quit my awful waiting job, because it was that or go to the welfare office. (Well, I did go there, and the interview was such a demeaning violation that I left it saying, Forget it. Ill find another way. Slowly, gradually, I did.)
Everything I do now, you can see the roots of it in my earliest primary school journals (pages of creative writing sprinkled with cartoons). But the path between there and here seems so tenuous. Letters from a great aunt in Scotland, a Scottish postcard from my grandmother, and now I live in the Old Country. I guess its all there, Chekovs guns lying all over the place to give clues about what would happen in later acts. But they could have backfired so badly.
My pal James and I went to a house party while I was in Toronto. He called a limo service to take us there. Dont worry, he assured me, it wont be some douchebag SUV. Honk-honk: guess what picked us up. When we arrived and walked away from the shiny black treehouse on wheels, I said to him, Look at us: Who knew we would make it? When we were first friends, going to nightclubs, we were broke most of the time and perpetually single. Now, well, were not that. (Though my lifestyle and income are — ahem — more modest than his. Power to the entrepreneurs.)
And what about all those shows, all that artistic effort? The posters, he scripts, the cards — it all seems a bit pointless. The shows closed, some of those people I worked with are dead now. And yet, I aspire to staying as deeply creative as that awkward young me strove to be. The understanding those experiences gave me seems like the only thing I can actually hold onto.
What to do with all those books, though, the lines and lines of angst and questioning?
For now, the paper avalanche has been sifted through and reduced to one bag which Im going to take to the basement. At some point Ill figure out how to use it all, but for now its just reassuring — if a bit emotionally wrenching — to feel like my past has all been relived, bundled together, and added to my present self. I think everyone feels compelled to validate their own experience, but I tend to find art that does that a bit tedious. Im more interested in using my imagination to look ahead.