Seven years ago my parents sold my childhood home and my sister and I were called into the garage, filled with towering stacks of organised boxes, to pull out what we wanted (or perhaps needed) to keep. This is what found me:
There are stories, folders and folders of them. Mostly hand-written, with a few typed up and printed out towards the end of high school. My first writing book from Kindergarten, each story from my weekend accompanied with a pencil drawing. There are issues of the newsletter whose readership extended to a few neighbours on our street (and likely also my Grandma). Then the postcards— sent from summer holidays when I felt we had travelled so gloriously far from home to the caravan park, but we’d simply driven a few hours north, sometimes a few more. It didn’t matter to me— it was all magical.
I was the first grandchild (despite being grandchild number eight) to write a letter to my Poppy and mail it. His written response one of my most treasured possessions. Words entrenched themselves in me as the purest form of love from the very beginning.
Mine was a childhood where words were everywhere, as real to me as the people in my life and the path from my bed to my bookshelf where I could find more.
The best way I can explain it is this:
I see cranes in my neighbourhood as I drive home from my children’s school, or the row of ice cream flavours lined in their tubs in a café, or the stacks of cereal boxes in the supermarket aisle, and the impact is visceral.
My body remembers these images from my picture books— I’m not even sure of their title but the experience of them is embedded within me.
After school there were letters, then emails, from Germany and summer camp, then a newsletter for the local youth group, designed by hand and a hodge-podge of early internet wordart tools, and photocopied onto coloured paper. A collage of early 2000’s technology.
By the time I arrived at university I couldn’t add colour or drawings to my anthropology essays. Writing became work, not play. Some words were mistaken. Some were intercepted and changed without my knowing. Some were spoken on my behalf and I never stepped in to correct them. In truth, writing for university tortured me and I began to discount and disallow my words in all the ways I could, until I had bound myself mute and thrown away the metaphorical pencil.
I turned to photography to share what I saw. It felt safe, taking and sharing photos— but it was only ever half the story.
Privately, words continued to sustain and guide me: writing them, reading them, drawing them. They’re my favourite way to decorate our walls. A small circle of women formed: precious ones who could see my floundering words and hold them in safety, slowly coaxing me out of hiding.
Sifting through the boxes of my childhood writing opened a door in my rib cage and reminded me who I am. I am now years decades past the hard words, the lost words and the made-up ones.
I have some things to say, and I’ll keep writing words, adding colour and life for as many decades more as I get 💫
Here’s to noticing—
Emma
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