Rambling, dated 17 Dec 2010
Posted 3rd March 2011 at 05:04 AM by Lucky_Lola
I have been many things in my life. Of course I have been a child and an adult, and that heady, fathomless thing in between. But there has been so much more. I have been girlfriend, lover and wife; I have been friend and enemy, stranger and kin. I have been student and teacher both, I have been the coach and one of the team. I have been the little fish in the big pond, and the big fish in the little pond, more times than I can count. I have been daughter, sister and cousin. I have been both one of the favoured and one on the outside, and I have stood alone while the maelstrom of life spun anonymously around me. I have been a local and a tourist, I have belonged and I have been cast out. I have been a foreigner in a strange land, an ex-patriot both proud of and ashamed at her distant home. I have been a number and a name, I have been a slave for The Man and been The Man myself.
Constant through it all, though, I have been an artist. Singer, musician, and dancer. Poet, playwright, and novelist. Actor, director, and black-garbed ghost behind the curtain. Occasional painter, mapmaker and photographer, and ever-increasingly, a comedienne. Soon I will be able to add makeup artist to the list.
Always, from my youngest imaginings through the long days of youth, the violent passions of adolescence, the self-discovery and explorations of early adulthood and now the deep mundaneness and world-weariness of my mid-twenties, I have told stories. Little did I know as a child how the formation and communication of tales would be my only constant in life. My earliest memory of this creative urge, this need, was in my parents’ caravan one wet, cold summer. I had a hot water bottle cover shaped like a cat. I wrote a poem about it. I think Mum still has it, somewhere – the poem that is. The cat-hottie fell apart.
And so I am left with words. And even when I forget that I have them, even when they fail me as they do sometimes, even when the agonising day-to-day bullsh*t of adult life robs me of the right ones… they come back to me. I had a crisis of identity earlier this year. I no longer knew what I wanted from life. In the end I decided that art was where I belonged. But I didn’t quite get it right.
I am a wordsmith. I hope I never forget it again.
Constant through it all, though, I have been an artist. Singer, musician, and dancer. Poet, playwright, and novelist. Actor, director, and black-garbed ghost behind the curtain. Occasional painter, mapmaker and photographer, and ever-increasingly, a comedienne. Soon I will be able to add makeup artist to the list.
Always, from my youngest imaginings through the long days of youth, the violent passions of adolescence, the self-discovery and explorations of early adulthood and now the deep mundaneness and world-weariness of my mid-twenties, I have told stories. Little did I know as a child how the formation and communication of tales would be my only constant in life. My earliest memory of this creative urge, this need, was in my parents’ caravan one wet, cold summer. I had a hot water bottle cover shaped like a cat. I wrote a poem about it. I think Mum still has it, somewhere – the poem that is. The cat-hottie fell apart.
And so I am left with words. And even when I forget that I have them, even when they fail me as they do sometimes, even when the agonising day-to-day bullsh*t of adult life robs me of the right ones… they come back to me. I had a crisis of identity earlier this year. I no longer knew what I wanted from life. In the end I decided that art was where I belonged. But I didn’t quite get it right.
I am a wordsmith. I hope I never forget it again.
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