Since This is Do Something Very Brave Weekend, as if you didn’t know, all you scaredy-cats who haven’t posted, yet, I had to dig verrry deep for something extra specially brave, seeing as every post, so far, is in one way or another quite out of my comfort zone. Don’t ask me to read my old posts back. This is Steemit after all, where one constantly has to renew onself every day.
I am one of those writers who would never even half belief she ever should try to publish “for real” because I cannot possibly take myself for real, in any accumulative sense. I depend on the consecutive one. It might be something that comes with the taoist terrain of the truth being here on its shaft of tomorrow and love having to be now in the present continuous.
In order to proove my mettle and support the bravest thing anyone can do (open the heart) I have had to think of pushing up against a final frontier. Still inspired by Arctic, perhaps! I had to sleep hard on it, though, all 2.5 hrs, and consult my bedpartner Otto, to know what needs to be done.
Steemit calls for experiments all the time. Above all, may this post supplement the post of Who Is Anybody, with the question Who Am I? I invite every Steemian to put this to themselves. May you let go of all the pictures you have taken of yourself and stored in your head, where they merely laminate who you really are. I suppose there is no end in sight, yet, to you needing to confirm thát you are through the representations of your vessel, although I shall always marvel at how it feels to you that it keeps the real you in the moment.
Here follows a creative attempt (sit up you #creativecoin people) to proove the daily creativity available to anyone that exists in making the effort to look at what is thanks to what we are making of it. It probably constitutes the kind of creativity that will make you mature enough to forgive your parents, your teachers, the whole world, including yourself.
(all but love is illusion, after all)
Ruffled anyway by the blustery wind I plucked up the courage to do something I’ve never done before: used the video function on myself.
I was comfortably enough dressed so why not find something else uncomfortable to do, today, as if it would be a day not lived if I had been nice to myself.
Few people own any photographs of me since age 10. I look like my father most of all, maybe that is difficult to see. How can that look any good on a woman? It’s all rooted in incredibly low self-esteem not boosted by a father who hoped I might still change into a boy at age 15.
If there is anything I am weary of it is the blame culture, therefore I see no fault in him for how I took his rare instance of waggish humour to effect the rest of my life. May it remind fathers, however, that adolescent children are hyper-sensitive and could use some extra encouragement.
The impact must have been exaggerated by the fact he seldom spoke to me at all.
I don’t know what my father had read, back then, but I think, chromosomal abnormalities that caused some type of androgeny in children (with both male and female sexual organs) was coming to the fore in the public arena around that time. He must have found such possibilities a bit bewildering, as he had found a daughter, no doubt, especially the one who couldn’t do maths and showed no aptitude for sports, physics, politics, chess or the piano.
He might have hoped he could have had more to say to me as a boy. I don’t think he would have known what to do for a child any better, though. Some fathers are old fashioned in their role and more there cannot be. Also parents and children may have their incompatibilities.
We get on okay now. I will never feel that he loves me, but I know it. I understand his type of love as best I can, and it is admirable, I suppose, considering how he feels personally insulted and rejected by my lack of interest in common sense, and practical solutions: he won't ever see that I am just like him. He is a good man. I don't think I would have felt that if someone hadn't recently been so generous to his own father. So I feel obliged to stand shoulder to shoulder and fortify the courage in adult children to release their parents in peace.
Perhaps it takes making it to fifty, before the final cracks of a child’s damaged soul can be plastered over. When it doesn’t happen then, though, it becomes a lot harder to make any progress. You have till around age 63, according to esoteric science to incorporate your karma. After that ninth seven-year period you have to dedicate your time to your excarnation (which can take up to forty years if you need it, and even the final struggle of long death bed). We must heed always for false-self-images (which are lies-to-self we probably all are guilty of). They pack in and set like blue ice before you know it.
I started a tiny project where I took a few photos of myself in 2018. They were put at the end of a little video I left before I had to go fishing for half a year, as tokens of my sincerity, my real and actual presence, for any of you who may have doubted it.
They are not “selfies” in the traditional sense, because those come out mirrored, they put a left eye on the right, and the right the wrong way around. Doesn’t it drive all you people potty? Can you still recognise yourselves? Or are you that symmetrical it doesn’t matter and wearing your heart on your other sleeve is just as doable? But of course, you all know yourselves from mirrors! Wait! I get it: the selfie is an attempt to share the picture you have of yourself. It's a long distance away from creative writing, surely?
Now, I can’t say that I recognised myself in these photos the right way around any better than I had hoped or worse than a mirror. Somebody inside the phone turns them into old ladies who have some of the features of their mother, they hadn’t signed up for. Plus they put 25 years on you.
I don’t bother with mirrors much, maybe to glance at an overall colour combination. Occasionally I might check my yoga posture, but I generally don’t have my lenses in then. So that hardly counts. I like the blurry pictures best from the phone: they look most like me.
Yet, after a while, pasting the pictures up into an impression of me, I became impervious to who that person might be. Just stick it up, post it up, done and dusted. Did as told. Mission complete.
So here is me being normal. I think that’s the point of cutting edge, supertube video, right? Unpacking my shopping - remembering I am thirsty, drinking some water – walking up and down – opening the garden door - putting up my hair to make a cup of tea - watching the fig blow, swaying wildly, while the kettle comes to a boil (hoping it will knock over 24’s fence) – and unboxing (always does well on video): unwrapping a couple of mail order books – checking the date, which I always put in the front of my purchase, clueless where to look on the calender – finding a free bookmark in “Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance: the Complete Works” that really made me laugh (reminded me of T-shirts) with a text that says: “it takes many pages to read a book from cover to cover.” And perpetually fidgeting until I stare a full 30 seconds at the fig. Riveting video!
But is it me you are looking at?
I can't tell.
And I won't be in hurry to look again for you soon!
New trauma to process now!
May I then leave you with my on-going advice
Find the Inbetween, that sweet spot where content and real time make up who your fellow Steemians are.
Pay attention. Be nice.
- Otto heads this post for me as a mascotte. In accord with his wishes, I have chosen a slightly blurry version of him in which he feels most comfortable (the way I see him at night).
- Photos taken from video shot by not quite sure.