It’s been five years since I’ve gone to church. The day-to-day anxieties that I once felt have receded into the background for the most part. I find myself stumbling for the vernacular that was once my entire understanding of the world when I try to explain things to my kids. I’ve lost both the words I once used, but also, the swell of inferences that came with them.
The other day I pulled out a book from the shelf and five index cards fell out. The handwriting was mine, written in pencil and tiny font. It must have been from my college days. I read through the words I’d written and didn’t feel much of a reaction. In large part, because the things I’d written about repentance, keeping the commandments, forgetting myself, didn’t seem tethered to the self I know and love now.
I have a lot of compassion for the person (young me) who wrote on those cards with so much fervor. Copying scriptures and quotes from general authorities. Taking notes on what other people were saying. I can see how in some ways, that attentiveness to wanting to do my best served me, and I can also see the ways in which it required me to abandon myself. There was nothing in those cards or my writing that might reveal my capacity for thinking outside of the box. There was no play or room for experimentation. My weirdness was buried so deep I was sure I could quash it forever in exchange for being seen as good.
For the past year I’ve slowly been working on a series of large oil paintings in my basement studio. I’ll be the first to admit that I am scared they are terrible, as much as I cannot stop making them. The paintings, like the work of making a poem, feel so unclear. Each of them has at least five layers as I’ve changed my mind, thought about a new idea, experimented and then changed again entirely. The paintings are not neat or tidy. They do not have color schemes or boundaries or clear compositions. No one has seen them because I am still embarrassed by how rudimentary they feel, by how childlike and silly and weird.
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