My mum asked me to crawl out under the eaves and retrieve some boxes of my old stuff.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Fast-forward about eight hours, and I\u0092ve 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I can\u0092t help wondering what he would have thought of the 44-year-old me. I didn\u0092t 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 client\u0092s office, where the team and he company\u0092s owners gave my self-esteem such a boost (once again) that it feels like I\u0092ve got a million bucks in the bank. I was even given a mansion to stay in for my last week there.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
So, yeah, it\u0092s not what the young me pictured, but it\u0092s damned good, and he was a little stupid anyway.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Yet, as I got pulled into all those journals and show-notes again, I couldn\u0092t 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 that\u0092s about making a stroke of luck repeatable. I can\u0092t think of any better education I could have had in art and life all at once.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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 (it\u0092s hard to be honest with an audience of hundreds when you can\u0092t be honest with your one self). But there\u0092s a kind of fondness to the melancholy ache of those memories. \u0093You were young, you were sexy, you were free!\u0094<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Yeah, but not really. I didn\u0092t 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, \u0093Forget it. I\u0092ll find another way.\u0094 Slowly, gradually, I did.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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 \u0093the Old Country\u0094. I guess it\u0092s all there, Chekov\u0092s guns lying all over the place to give clues about what would happen in later acts. But they could have backfired so badly.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
My pal James and I went to a house party while I was in Toronto. He called a limo service to take us there. \u0093Don\u0092t worry,\u0094 he assured me, \u0093it won\u0092t be some douchebag SUV.\u0094 Honk-honk: guess what picked us up. When we arrived and walked away from the shiny black treehouse on wheels, I said to him, \u0093Look 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.\u0094 Now, well, we\u0092re not that. (Though my lifestyle and income are — ahem<\/em> — more modest than his. Power to the entrepreneurs.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n What to do with all those books, though, the lines and lines of angst and questioning?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n For now, the paper avalanche has been sifted through and reduced to one bag\u0085 which I\u0092m going to take to the basement. At some point I\u0092ll figure out how to use it all, but for now it\u0092s 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. I\u0092m more interested in using my imagination to look ahead.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My mum asked me to crawl out under the eaves and retrieve some boxes of my old stuff. Fast-forward about eight hours, and I\u0092ve 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}