j u s t . d a n c e

Crowds have become a crazy source of stress for me lately; I mainly blame the TTC for this and the daily hours which I now spend navigating stations in rush hour, getting trapped in turnstiles and shoved by strangers. It used to be that I'd shrug while someone else expressed their distress at visiting crowded locales — now I feel disoriented and slightly panicked when I'm faced with them.

It's not the being trapped that I fear; I think instead, it's the watchful eyes of people that I don't know and accidental collisions which make me nervous. I don't want to be the cause of displeasure; I don't want to be out of place or a nuisance.

Ironically, the crowd at a night club calms me; there in the darkness, I can lose myself amongst the bodies and pulsating noise. The semi-hedonistic ritual of dancing with reckless abandon is utterly freeing for me; albeit not foolproof, more often than not the mixture of obscurity and deafening music relieves me of every worry, every doubt and all of my unnecessarily self-imposed rules for polite behavior . In those anonymous moments, I can stop being the girl who ruins everyone's fun with her anxiety and simply be fun-girl.

•

I was a late bloomer in terms of youthful things like alcohol and partying. It wasn't until I was in my early twenties that I allowed my cousin to convince me to join her for a night out of drinking and dancing. I still remember the feeling of my awkward self-consciousness slowly abating as I stood at the edge of a room lit by red lights, watching as the crowd meandered in; there was a girl, dressed in schoolgirl blouse and kilt, dancing alone on the empty floor. She had her eyes closed and she moved with confidence and complete nonchalance; at the time I laughed, but now I am that girl.

o v e r . h e a r d

As heard spoken by a jubilant teenager on the Yonge-University line.

t r i o

Relics from an old, old time.

Long ago, my younger cousin and I spent an afternoon drawing caricatures while her sister and friend watched the original Pet Cemetery in the next room. Even though I was the eldest of us, I chickened out of watching right around the introduction of Zelda, the evil sister with meningitis; I excused myself, hid in my cousin's bedroom and together we whipped up page after page of drawings. She had a stack of templates which we traced over (while I attempted to erase the horrific things that I had just witnessed from my mind). Here are a few which I found this past week in a folder of old art: the golden trio, Ron, Hermione and Harry.

*

Love you Jes & Shelbey.

w a n d e r

Remembering, forgetting, amnesia, secrets, lies, truths, goals, hopes, dreams, nightmares. 

Time and place, coming and going, drifting away.

•

When I was little, I would walk to the wide windows of my bedroom and survey the land beyond; I gazed across the treetops and field and imagined that I was a princess in a tower, on the verge of adventure. 

As children, the capacity to manipulate existence with the mind is magic. Eventually, the world, it's rules and expectations fade those abilities away...but maybe it would be better if we  still allowed ourselves to detach from reality. 

l a s t . n i g h t

Dreams — I love them.

In university, when I proposed a series of work illustrating dreams that I'd had, my professor shot me down; he reminded me that "no one is interested in reading about other people's dreams". I've heard that opinion more than once; someone likened the experience of listening to the dreams of others to flipping through snapshots that you aren't present in (initially mildly interesting and ultimately boring).

I can agree, to some degree; when someone exclaims:

"OH MY GOD, I had the strangest dream! I was shopping with Lance Bass and then he tried on this red shirt and then we were on a beach and then my grade school best friend was somehow there and wow...it was so weird..."

Stories like this are, in my opinion, boring not because the action centers around someone else but because the person relating the story is doing so in a poor fashion. When it comes to story telling, my motto is :

In my opinion, if a dream is told properly, it has as much potential (if not more) to be engaging. A narrative presented by the subconscious is free flowing and organic — there is no creative anxiety, no forced dialogue or counterproductive logic-induced pressure. I view the dream as a perfect self contained story, which when relayed properly, is vibrant, strange and unsettling; the dream is a skeleton to be fleshed out with jarring adjectives and sharp movement.

I'm adamant that dreams can be interesting; I'd like to share my own with you — I'll let you be the judge.

*
I'm a difficult night-time sleeper — my mind wanders and I find fear in every shadow. I've always needed ambient noise to unwind at bedtime and lately I've been sleeping with my television and fan on timers. When I slip away to dreamland, I'm surrounded by sounds and light; when I'm awakened hours later by nightmares, it's to silence and darkness. Within the dreamscape, I embody constant composure and uncharacteristic calm; conscious, I lie still, frozen with unease.

*

She's a monster masquerading as an elderly woman with immaculately curled, pale blonde hair. I see her smile sweetly with her pink lips pulled taught; her eyes are orbs the colour of slate. She's been living next door for years, and now that we're moving, she wants to come explore the house.

Our family is packing; I'm drawing glowing constellations on the rugs (paisley-patterned velvet) with yellow, iridescent paint. She enters the shadowy living room, paces slowly and poses before the bare window. She taps her long, pointed nails on the dark glass as her spectral reflection gleams back at me. She sneers; her teeth are razor blades, finely tapered, pearly daggers.

There's a struggle — she's vicious, despite her bony countenance and thin, veined wrists. There's a box of sharpened pencils on the mahogany table and she aims them at me, one by one: grey, yellow, orange.

Suddenly, she's suicidal, dragging me towards her body and grinning madly as she beckons for me to impale her with one of the sticks. I strike; blood wells up from a tiny hole in her skeletal shoulder. She sighs contentedly, and reclines onto the floor. In the dim moonlight, I stab her in the chest, struggling to push the pencil through a fountain of red and into the stiff muscle of her heart.

Eyes closed, she's wriggling her head side to side like a puppy, searching for a comfortable position in which to die.

b u b b l e . g u m

Those were the lyrics of my three year old self's song; I had learned it from two older girls --sisters-- at my babysitter's house. 

(I fully understand the appeal of teachig a little kid to say something borderline inappropriate, so I can't really blame them. My cousin Shelbey, who was, for a time, the youngest of our group, used to be able to speak in this great creepy voice, halfway between a gremlin and an evil henchman; my cousins, siblings andI used  to coach her to say things like "I'm going to run you over with my tractor" or "I'll cut you up into little pieces and hide you in the walls". We found this endlessly amusing.)

For whatever reason, I loved this disgusting song. My grandmother would despair of me singing it, asking in a sweet voice "Samantha, isn't there something else that you would like to sing for Gramma?"; nope, I knew what I liked, and I liked Bubblegum

My grandparents once made an audio recording of me at that age, and it's there; my baby voice sings slowly, putting emphasis on noooooose and BUM and stretching out bub-ble-gum! (It's pretty adorable). I also sing Happy Birthday to my mum and my tiny voice rumbles progressively lower on "dear mommy".

I'm so grateful to have that evidence of my former self.

•

There was another song, possibly by Sharon, Lois and Braham* about "sticky, sticky, sticky, sticky bubblegum".

I learned that lesson first hand the night when I decided to save a piece of chewed up gum by sleeping with it in my hand. Palming a wad of gum seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, but needless to say, come morning my leg was covered in a sticky, pink mess. My mum threw me immediately into the bath, and I'll never forget the pain of trying to pick it off my skin.

•

*This trio was a favourite of mine growing up. The first three things that come to mind are:

Being sick late at night and being allowed to lie up on the couch and watch tv; the one thing on for me was (maybe) a concert featuring Sharon, Lois and Braham in a train station.

The Elephant Show theme song.

The Halloween episode where the children went trick-or-treating in broad daylight and were given eggs and vegetables in lieu of candy; they had UNICEF boxes and seemed estatic about the whole situation (which as a child, made me sad).

w o r d s

When I was young, I wasn't exactly a fan of the outdoors.

When Alia Shawkat's character in Whip It said, "I didn't have a Barbie-roller-skates phase; I had a fat-kid-sits-inside-and-reads-a-book phase", she was speaking about me. Surprising, I know.

In grade-school, my brother and I would trek up north to the Bruce Peninsula and spend weeks of our summer vacations living with our cousins on their farm. It was the kind of place where children were encouraged/expected to play outside for most of the day, which would have been fine if I hadn't been so afraid of nature. Their tall, white farmhouse stands out in my mind like a beautiful, cozy beacon, the sole refuge in a vast expanse of windy forest, field, mud and angry chickens.

They also had a cottage on the lake where we would swim, catch frogs and crayfish, explore islands. I always had this vague feeling of not belonging there; I was the awkward, round girl who just wanted to be quiet and inconspicuous, constantly homesick in a dull way. I wasn't outgoing or fun; I felt like someone who had to be tolerated and taken care of. I wanted to escape from that idea of myself, to hide away from the uncomfortable reality that I was facing...so I begged my aunt for books to read.

She gave me A Spell for Chameleon, Piers Anthony's first Xanth novel; I remember looking at the paperback's golden-brown cover and not expecting much. Over the next few days, I sat sideways in an old armchair and read, read, read and (again) fell in love with a book-world full of magic, bravery and puns. It was there that I was introduced to words like scintillating and I readily latched onto the concept of elegant synonyms that evoked more vivid meaning that their commonly used counterparts.

Over the ensuing years, I devoured that series and have since reread many of its volumes. They became a part of me, a piece of the collection of items and ideas and experiences that have shaped me; it's interesting for me to think back, as if I'm still that insecure little girl, longing for an escape and finding one there in the pages of someone else's book, someone else's home. That discomfort and anxiety that I felt as a child has translated into a cherished part of my psyche.

Remember: positivity can grow from negativity.

w o r d s

When I was about 13, I fell in LOVE with a book by Eve Forward called Villians by Necessity, which my grandmother had bought for me at an everything for a dollar, going-out-of-business book sale. It was a fantastic tale of good and evil, light and dark, magic and criminals; the main characters were an assassin, a thief, a druid and a twisted lady-vampire. I literally carried it with me everywhere for a long, long time, drew on all the pages, marked off all of my favourite parts, lent it to my friends (aka, insisted that they also read it) and memorized passages (which I still remember). I also drew some pretty terrible fan art.

This book inspired me to create my first character, a blonde, blue-eyed assassin named Nick Macabre--except that, because I was 13, I pronounced it Maca-bray and thought it sounded like some kind of bony stingray. I went through a serious assassin phase after that (what is that?); I even asked the same grandmother who had bought me the book to sew me a black cloak for Halloween (and I felt excellent skulking around the darkness wearing it and Doc Martens--I suppose it's no wonder that I later also went through pseudo goth phase).

In reality, I'm a BIG believer in non-violence (and always have been), but there was something so terribly romantic about a thoughtful, articulate man, well educated in the ways of weapons and poisons and snuffing corrupt political figures. I guess that was just my teenage bad-boy phase; instead of crushing on punks in leather, I was into medieval anti-heroes.

f l a s h . b a n g

Thunderstorms: in my childhood, I dreaded them.

The heralding humidity made my skin prickle and my habitually nervous stomach churn into overtime. I remember the summer sight of heavy pastel evening, the sky a low canopy of clouds, cotton soaked in ink. Once the storm started, the rumble and abrupt BANGs were always cataclysmic to me; I felt as if I was the only one on earth who realized that this event was the apocalypse.

My mother loved them, and would celebrate their coming by opening the house's windows to listen to the rain and the low BOOMs. Once, when I was about ten years old, the anxiety that this caused me was so terrible that she had a friend on the phone tell me that he was a meterologist and that no, thunderstorms wouldn't kill me, and that yes, it was alright to open the windows during them.

When I was a few years older, I devised a sort of coping ritual; in the muggy heat of summer vacation, I decided that thunderstorm time would be art time. Along with my younger brother, I spent those nightmare evenings in my bedroom, watching cartoons on my tiny tv and drawing. I created a comic character named Mr. Olive Head; he was a news reporter who was basically an olive with a hat and a microphone.

By the time I was in my 20s, I should have been able to fully cope; this wasn't the case. Once upon a May sunset, I was caught out near Spadina Ave. underneath ominous clouds. The date whom I was with was completely nonchalant; every CRACK of thunder or bright flash made me flinch involuntarily and his comments made me feel ashamed of my reaction. I walked towards shelter as quickly as possible, wondering why I wasn't allowed to be afraid and beginning to question the lack of validity that others gave to my feelings.

h e l l o

Well, it's been a while!

My instinct right now is to sheepishly apologize for my absence and say something lame and self-deprecating in order to save face. A year or so ago I would have done it, but today I'm fighting it.

This is because, basically, I've finally given myself permission to be myself.

This sounds silly, but let me explain; when I was a little girl I was strong-willed, sure of myself, and vocal. If I wanted something (or didn't!) I would let it be known without hesitation. I knew what made me happy (reading quietly, drawing, cats, etc.) and what didn't (pickles! bugs! thunderstorms!) and I'd always let the people around me know. I don't think that I was rude or mean (at least not any more than everyone is at that age) but I was decisive and confident and polite, which I think is excellent.

"I'm a Terrible Person," Became My Mantra

As I grew up though, somehow the confident and decisive parts fell away and I was left quiet and polite; I became the girl who always followed the rules and did what she was supposed to do. I evolved into thinking that my own wants and needs were secondary to those of others. I focused on making people happy in a toxic way, believing that speaking up was rude, that my opinions didn't matter, that I wasn't as good or important as everyone else was(and that I didn't deserve to be). "I'm a terrible person," became my mantra and I constantly felt anxious and downtrodden; the more worry piled onto my heart, the more silence seemed like a refuge, and the more I felt trapped in my own psyche. I was stifled, nervous and unsure, regardless of how many people told me that I was sweet, lovely, thoughtful etc.

As an artist, this was devastating; I compared my work and my presence to my peers and felt that I came up far too short. Progress and practice seemed pointless; self-promotion felt obnoxious and hollow.

And while all this negativity went on inside, I remained that quiet, submissive girl who was convinced that speaking up about her anxiety and expressing herself would cause her to drive the world (and job opportunities) away. My truth was shameful and my real self seemed worthless. I was torn between who I was, who I wanted to be and who other people said that I should be.

I Have Something to Say

I'm not entirely sure what the breaking point was, but this past year (my lowest lows and some pretty excellent highs) has inspired massive amounts of personal growth and change. I've rediscovered the powerful little girl that I used to be and her brightness drives me on. I see now that my own happiness should be the top priority in my life; I'm speaking up more often and find that simply expressing my opinions (big and small) is an immense relief of pressure. My new mantra is "I have something to say," and it makes me feel strong, in control and excellent again. Instead of agonizing over what people think about me, I realize that the only person I need to satisfy is myself. I do what I want to again, and it's exhilarating. I can still be quiet (sometimes) and polite, but now because I want to be, not because I have to be.

And so, here I am, ready for action! 

_
_

y o u . r u i n e d . m y . b i r t h d a y

A "drawing" from the year of no drawing.

Inspired by the story of a girl whose improperly packaged, leftover birthday soup ruined her party dress. In an ensuing memo, the restaurant manager scolded his staff but assured them that an apology had been delivered, along with gift certificates. He was sure that the girl and her family would remain loyal customers.

I'm sure that they wouldn't.

Things like that stay with you.

___

Paint and yarn on a canvas dress. It's wearable, for someone small enough.