Become you

”As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned.”  –Agatha Christie

It was a green piece of construction paper with three orange islands pasted on it, creating distinct sections on the page. I’d say the whole page was probably 17 inches long. Maybe, in fact, it was an 11 by 17 inch piece of paper. What a concept. If I had ever studied the metric system in school, I could provide that data, but I didn’t, so let’s move on rather than devolve into a full-blown reproach of the American educational system.

I wasn’t thinking as I tore the paper—or was I? So much of the process was unconscious, and it was only when I opened my mouth the next morning to speak to the art I had created that the truth came clear.

The collage I put in front of the group last weekend was a study in minimalism. Others had covered their construction paper with a multitude of beautiful images; mine held one image (I couldn’t find a photo of Mr Depp), a photograph of my family, and several words. There was a lot of blank space showing through. What can I say? I’m in a minimalist kind of space at the moment.

The art project was part of a recent weekend meeting in Seattle, a gathering of wonderful, smart, fun people I’ve worked with over the past few years to deliver diversity training to a major U.S. corporation. Usually, we are flying across the country, passing each other in the air or emailing about schedule changes; this weekend was an opportunity for us to gather in one room again.

On Friday night, the planning committee asked us to create a collage representing our lives, and particularly what is new for us in the two years since we last met as a group. We gathered at a reception on the patio, scissors and glue stick in hand, tearing magazines apart and offering images to one another—“this one reminds me of you!” leaving the recipient to wonder why and how—before we attacked the dinner buffet with the same energy and sense of purpose.

Over the weekend, we re-introduced ourselves using our collages. People told of losses in their lives, challenges, new loves (one every decade!), searches for love (or at the very least for a good woman who can do flips!), work-related successes, priorities, the life. As I started to talk, I found myself saying something that had never occurred to me until that very moment, not even the night before when I had cut out the photograph of a tree blown almost over in half from the force of a wind and pasted it to my construction paper life.

“This,” I said, pointing to the tree, “is my life before 2005.”

I surprised even myself when I said those words. But, having said them, and with 20 sets of eyes looking at me, expectantly, I felt compelled to continue. And so I did.

As e.e. cummings once wrote, “it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”   After bowing to the wind, being blown into one thing or another—even if they were successful and rewarding—with the writing of 37days and the start of my Circle Project work in 2005, I think I began to right myself, stick my roots deeper into earth, resist the wind, tell my own story, not the one I felt I should tell, not the books others wanted me to write, but my very own.

I got an email recently from a woman I didn’t yet know named Eliza Cavanaugh—she said it was okay to use her name if I wrote about our correspondence. After she read this post, she chided me, albeit gently, for being insecure about my poofy hair, cat-scratched couch, and child-bearing hips when my high school buddies came for a visit. “I hope you not only take to heart your own insight about not needing to make excuses, but that you can actually find a way to gain perspective on your fabulous worldly expression to the extent that you might even become, oh, pleased as punch, or for heaven’s sake, how about comfortable?”

In part, I responded that in fact, I’m often pleased as punch. I vowed to write more about being pleased as punch—and Eliza and I embarked on a correspondence, her unique voice showing through: “even before you responded, it occurred to me that it might not be particularly helpful to essentially chastise someone, however admiringly or supportively, for feeling what they feel and writing about it.” I didn’t feel chastised, but engaged. “I do have a remarkable life,” I wrote, “and I do feel insecure. Not always, sometimes not at all, but sometimes. I think that is important for my daughters to know—that it’s okay to doubt, if doubt brings questions that can provide clarity about what really matters.”

My response to Eliza, in fact, delivered the tree, though I didn’t know it at the time: “For much of my life, if I’m honest with myself, I have play-acted through my professional life—knowing that it wasn’t what I truly needed to be doing, sometimes even feeling like I was outside of myself watching it. I was successful by anyone’s measure, except by my own; I was looking at books I had written as if they were not mine. And now, ironically, I am the most successful by my own internal measure, and the least successful by anyone else’s. It is a good lesson for me, to be sitting at both the top and bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy at the very same time, saying no to financial gain that is at the cost of the Self I have found. There is no other time for me to write but now.”

A few years ago, I attended a class at Penland School of Crafts. Penland is a magical place for me—I wear my Birkenstocks proudly and throw my Kiehl blackberry lip gloss to the wind. Studios are open 24-hours-a-day and you are surrounded by artists making, not surprisingly, art. That year, I was enrolled in a two-week class, a plan marred only by the need to leave for 2 days to don my Power Suit, eyeliner, and briefcase to fly to Dallas and conduct a workshop for the CEO of a big financial institution and his direct reports.

When the wind blows, sand often flies.

It felt like grit in my eyes, the very prospect of leaving this magical place for a power suit gathering of dueling Blackberrys. I sat at dinner the night before leaving, bemoaning my fate, the injustice of it all, yada, yada, yada. The man I was sitting with was someone I had met the day before, a sculptor taking a blacksmithing course. He listened quietly to my tale of woe, no doubt wishing he had sought out the company of a weaver or a woodworker rather than a whiner. “I feel sometimes like I am speaking, but someone has actually got their hand in my back making my mouth move, like a puppet, I said.” With that, he sat bolt upright. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t move.”

I sat still for 10 minutes. He returned with a postcard. “This is from my last show,” he said. “I think you’ll like the piece on the front of the postcard.”

I looked down. On that card was a sculpture he had done of a man in a business suit, a torso. The head was made of recycled farm implements. On the back of the postcard was a view of the back of the torso, in which there was a small door. When opened, there was a crank that you could turn. And when you turned the crank, the mouth moved. A metaphorical architecture made visible in heavy iron, indeed.

When I lived in Sri Lanka in 1976, I was mesmerized by the massive palm trees along the coast, insanely tall and bent over almost double from the force of a wind over time. We are moving in a direction, it occurs to me, even when we feel like we are not. Perhaps it isn’t apparent today, or tomorrow, or next Thursday, but it will be—the photograph we show the world will clearly delineate what direction that wind was coming from over all those years we lived, won’t it?

“When I worked as a cashier in a natural foods market years ago,” Eliza wrote back, “a supervisor told me that a friend of hers always wanted to go through my line, to check out what I was wearing. ‘She thinks you’re so cool!’ she said. ‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘I wish I were me.’”

That’s exactly it, I wrote to Eliza. I wish I were me. Somedays I’m more me than others.

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld once said, “We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.” The thing about those trees blown by the wind is that pretty soon, they stay that way. It’s incremental, but cumulative. It’s gradual, but lasting. Intention and direction, intention and direction.

As Agatha Christie said (my thanks to Jill for helping me relocate my new favorite quote), “it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned.”

Know your mask, then take it off. Perhaps it will be disconcerting to those around you to see the real you—they’ll live or they won’t, but you will.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

As Oscar Wilde wrote in De Profundis (1905), “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

Become you, that You not shaped by outside forces, but the one standing up straight, a perfect balance of wind and still, of solid and sway. I wonder, what wind is blowing you? Is it so gradual that you don’t even notice the bend?