Learning how to explore my creativity inside and outside of parenting, marriage, and work. Kids, parenting, family, coffee, cycling, writing, soccer, and exploring my imagination. RPCV Kyrgyzstan.
Faded, very light blue jeans with holes in the knees. Gym shoes. Hooded sweat shirt, with hood pulled up over a baseball cap, jacket over the hoodie.
2 day old beard and glasses. Warm face, blue eyes. Wedding ring. Weathered, pale skin.
*Answers a call with a headset, only 1 earpiece in (the other one dangling). Has a brief conversation with a friend and catches up on happenings of the week. Shifts conversation suddenly to say he had to attend a wake tonight “of the young man who had a run in with a tree.” Ends conversation by telling his friend he’d call him after the wake: “Peace, brother, I’ll holler at you later.”
Sometimes I wonder if the periods of my life (sometimes weeks on end) when I feel very little emotional spark from the world around me (and thus very little inspiration to respond to it creatively) are another, more subtle form, of my ongoing journey with depression.
I’ve definitely found myself short on temper during states of depression, but have only recently become aware of the emotional disconnect. That sounds weird to just now discovering it, but I’ve grown up with a father and grandfather who lived life like this as their norm. It hasn’t stood out to me because it was part of my norm.
Maybe they both spent long periods of their own lives struggling with depression. Maybe I’m just learning how to be aware of it.
Spent the day yesterday w/ 4 pretty awesome kids. I had a ton of fun w/ them, but it did bring back to the surface some interesting social standards. We went to the park a few times yesterday. Three separate times I received comments about “How great it is that you’re out here with all these kids!” and “You got your hands full with this bunch!”
While part of my ego loves those comments, another part of me wonders what I would say or think if I saw a woman at a park by herself with 4 kids. I get praise for my “ability” to be at a park with 4 kids, but I bet that wouldn’t always be the case for Amy. I bet that, while some people would think she’s doing awesome, an equal amount would silently wonder why she’s there with four kids.
How many of us have seen a mom in public with several kids, some of them acting wild, and wonder what’s wrong with her or why did she have so many kids. We’d look at her outfit choice or in her shopping cart or her tone of voice with her children or even to see if she if she has a ring on her finger.
It’s high time that when we have the chance, we start choosing to praise, support, and lift each other up instead of searching for faults. Sure, my experience yesterday was somewhat isolated, but it speaks to the unwavering images and identities we force upon our society.
There is no one standard of parent or mom or dad. We are all uniquely beautiful and flawed. Dad’s should supported the same as mom’s. Married people with kids loved as much as single people with kids. We are a better society when look for ways to support each other instead assuming we know a right way to do anything or be anyone, especially parenting.
I stopped caring about awards show in college, about 10 years ago now. As most college students do, I went through a pretty eye opening exploration of self during my time at school. I met new people from background vastly different to mine, was exposed to new art, experimented with various states of being, and began to see myself from a different angle. I experimented a lot with who I was, but mostly did so through resisting a lot of who I was my first 18 years. If it was new/”foreign”/unexpected, I loved it. Naturally, this had some consequences, but it allowed me to really dive into art, cultures, and communities I had not previously explored.
The deeper I got into these, the more I saw myself in them and the more I appreciated their art. It didn’t take long to also realize how little recognition this art received from “pop culture” or “mainstream media.”. To be interested in them, you had to search them out or they had to have done some type of “crossover” that allowed them to intersect with the mainstream. Thus when time came for award shows (or popular press recognition), it was really obvious they were not going to get recognized.
For a while, I rebelled hard and quite ignorantly against pop culture. I’ve since grown up a bit and learned to appreciate the beauty that can be found in pop art. That said, I’ve also learned to dislike award shows even more. The more socially conscious I’ve become (doubling down as I’ve become a parent of two) and the more aware I’ve become of how narrowly award shows view society, I’ve gotten angry.
The recent announcement for Oscar nominees did two things for me:
I realized that in the time since I was last a teenager until now, I’ve really shifted my perspective, interests and understanding of award shows. I used to love watching them for their great performance collaborations, super-hyped monologues, and suspenseful announcements. They just don’t interest me any more. Not is a spiteful way (that’s the next point), but they just don’t interest me.
But then I realize I pernicious these awards show can be. The 2015 (and, 2014) Oscar nominees is despicable,at best, and blatantly racist at the worst. Not only does this once again set a narrow standard for greatness in art, but this announcement perpetuates a stereotype for to the millions of kids and teens coming of age with pop culture that great art only comes from white (mostly male) artists.
Millions of kids around the world will have their images of great art painted by an incredibly narrow view of greatness. Beauty is surely in the eye of the beholder, but when that beholder is wealthy, white, and male, that beauty is presented as white, male, and has the money to be advertised as the standard for beauty.
My parents generation decrees the lost of creativity and individual thinking in “kids these days.” You know what that’s a result of? That is a result of decades of art and beauty being given one standard of excellence. You can only in-breed for so long before all of pop art becomes a gray mess of the same thing. If the standard for beauty and the standard for art continuously get promoted as one color, or one shape, or one gender, or one sound, or one story-line, then we lead kids to believe there is no other standard. Everything else is “experimental” or avant-garde.
My first steps, as a parent, are to help expose my children to the diverse world they live in. As a human and member of many different communities, it’s my responsibility to acknowledge my privilege, challenge that privilege, and help to build dialogues that will help shatter the walls and ceilings preventing artists of colors from being represented as equally as white artists. We are all complicit.
But like @deray, said this week, “We can’t address what we don’t talk about.”
With my son asleep in the back seat, my dad and I sped down the Kennedy into the Chicago evening. We had just dropped my car off at a shop in the suburbs and he was giving us a ride back home to our place on the north side of the city. Ben fell asleep early in the ride, so most of the time my dad and I were free to shoot the shit. I dropped the usual questions about family, his latest landscaping projects, his latest [insert any joint from waist to toes] surgery, and updates on my home life. As has been the case as I’ve gotten older, I avoided all topics of money and politics–two areas where we each pretend to understand the other person’s point of view.
As we exited the Kennedy, I felt a strange feeling I’d never felt before. I looked at people on the sidewalks talking and saw a city in motion, welcoming Spring’s arrival. Bikes were riding alongside us and cars were driving like city drivers. The city made me feel comfortable, in a place I knew. I was also acutely aware of my father’s presence.
I wondered what he was thinking. I wondered what he saw.
Did he see the city the way I saw it? Was it a place he felt at ease in, a member of or did he feel like he owned it? Did he feel like all these people he didn’t know were just in in his way; was that lady who cut him a driver that angered him? What did he think when we people of different colors and genders crossed in front of us on the crosswalk?
I find myself, at rare moments of silence and solitude, contemplating what it is that gives me purpose.
The clichéd idea of “what will you remember on your death bed” (recently shared by our President to a group of interns) holds a lot of weight for me. I’m not sure if it’s cause I’m a millennial or simply human, but for most of my 20s I held onto the belief that I was destined for something great in my life. I knew, whenever my time would come and I was on my death bed, that I would look back at something great. Maybe a prolific career as a writer or an esteemed professor of something intellectually important.
I never saw myself really as a community leader of any type (seemed to take too much work), I always envisioned myself as some type of thought leader. Someone who was celebrated for their insight and understanding of the world.
Maybe that was a bit lofty.
I still work, when possible, at being a writer, but my 30s have brought with them a few doses of reality and priority shifting. I don’t envision greatness the way I used to. It’s a lot more personal now. I still dream of being a great writer one day, but I also realize that if it’s meant to be, it will happen. I can work at it, and I do, but there’s so much in life outside of my control that I can’t bring myself to a place where I believe I have control. It leads to way too much stress and panic attacks.
I don’t really know these days what I want to remember on my death bed. I know I want to be a good parent and partner. I know I want to leave the world a better place than when I got here. Beyond that, I’m not sure on details. Maybe that’s enough (those take quite a bit of work). Maybe I’ll become more or maybe I’ll learn to become content with greatness being small.
I was a snowboarder all throughout high school and college. I worked a catering job back then. I would say 90% of the money I made went into snowboarding.
It may have been snowboarding, it may have been youthful naivety, but one of the most vivid feelings of my youth was from snow. Waking up in the morning to a fresh coat of snow, feeling the snow fall onto my eye lashes, even shoveling the snow, it all brought a full-bodied feeling of exuberance.
Fresh snowfall is still very beautiful, but that feeling is gone. Not by any intentional action; that feeling, the joy of snow, just doesn’t take over my body like it used to.
It runs in the family. There’s something about the arrival of winter that brings with it mood swings and emotional instability. It sounds ridiculous; the idea that the change in the season has the ability to affect my mental health. I would continue to believe it’s ridiculous unless I experienced it for every winter most of my adult life.
I’m working on responses to it, but honestly the toughest part has been acknowledging it exists (to myself and my community). When it affects my interactions with those I love and has such a negative effect on my health, it’s my responsibility to admit the reality.
And the reality is that, unless I am proactive, I begin to feel like I’ve lost control. Some of my actions feel dictated by a state of being and emotions that are not mine.
