Rhena Writes

Tag: blog

  • Fave discussion topic: me, myself, and I.

    Daily writing prompt
    What topics do you like to discuss?
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    I used to pretend that I didn’t like to talk about myself. It seemed, at the time, more polite. I’d act like I enjoyed talking about the other person, politics, the news, art, books, science, whatever topic the other person was interested in. I’m very good at listening very intently — or at least giving the appearance of doing as much — and asking all the questions to keep the conversation going towards the other person.

    I can see now that that was all an act. At the time, I truly thought that was who I was: someone able to hold everyone else’s stories and interests. The truth is that I was carving out bits and pieces of myself to make room for everyone else. The end result is that I reached middle age barely knowing myself.

    They say it’s better late than never. And honestly, I think I started to realize this just in time. Somewhere inside of me, there’s a little spark of myself, my true self, not the mask, not the illusion I created to please everyone else. But a spark is all that’s needed to create a flame and then a fire. And so I add some dry kindling (paper will do for these early stages) and blow gently. For now, even the exhalation of breath through my nose is enough. But soon, I will purse my lips and pull from deep within my lungs. I’ll push out air and form words through my throat, my tongue and teeth. These will join together to sentences and paragraphs. And each one is part of me. And the spark will become a flame and soon a fire, fed by my own care and nurturing of myself. I will discuss myself and in doing so, I will also grow myself, the same self that I unwittingly dismissed in favor of something else, outside of me, for all those years.

    And the flame is me and it grows stronger each time I speak of myself to myself. And is soon able to consume and enjoy any topic, relating it all back to myself which grows stronger and takes up more and more space. Expansive. Steady. Whole.

  • Right now. This is a risk.

    Daily writing prompt
    When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?
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    Every time I write, whether it’s pen to paper or hands to keyboard, I’m taking a risk. I know. It doesn’t seem like it. I’m sitting in the comfort of my own house. I’m doing something (writing) I’ve been doing every day for the last month and which I’ve been studying for much, much longer. It should be easy, right? Low-risk? Safe even?

    Nope.

    It’s time and energy towards something that’s seemingly frivolous. What if I’m misunderstood? What if I run out of ideas? What if the creativity spring runs dry? What if I wasted it all on this one post? What if the time I’m taking towards doing this would be better off spent raising chickens or cleaning my kitchen? What if a meteor hits my house right as I’m sitting here? What if I develop carpal tunnel syndrome from all this typing?

    What if I die a Taurus? What if I die on purpose?
    What if it wasn’t even worth it? What if I’m walkin’ alone?
    What if I choke on this Slurpee? What if I make it big?
    What if my car exploded
    While I’m casually pumping the gas and smokin’ a cig?
    What if my life was loaded?     (Lyrics from Doechii’s Stanka Pooh)

    It’s putting myself, my thoughts, ideas words, images out there. Judgement and ridicule waiting just around each corner. Or they could just collapse out there in the world, unseen, unknown, unrecognized?

    But there are worse things. Like what?

    Playing it safe. I could just go clean the kitchen. I could just stand up from this desk and, well, quite literally do any number of other things: go for a walk, read, drive to the beach, buy a plane ticket to the Maldives, take a nap on the couch, blow dandelion seeds, steal a car, etc… And, yes, all of those have risks involved.

    I could do what I was doing before, the low-risk, safe option: writing and submitting that writing for someone else (a publisher or editor or judge) to “approve” my writing, to decide it was worthy of publication. But in the end, that “safe” option was much more damaging to me, to my emotional health. I allowed each rejection to be a blow to my self image, my self worth. I let them dim my light.

    Finally, I decided to stop playing it safe, to stop asking for approval from other people, and to start saying “yes” to myself. I started this blog. Each time I hit publish, it’s a risk. Someone could “steal” my words or twist my ideas. I have just enough experience in the world to know that there are ways in which what I publish here could be used against me. But I don’t spend too much time thinking about that, doing risk assessments, or trying to protect myself and keep everything one hundred percent safe. If I did that, I’d be trapped in an endless cycle of perfectionism, double checking, making sure I was pleasing everyone else all the time. I know where that cycle kept me: in silence.

    Instead, what I do is I trust. I trust the source of my creativity, I trust my lived experiences and, above all else, I trust myself. I breath. And I smash that button: publish.

  • The risks of living and writing.

    Daily writing prompt
    Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.
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    I do not regret anything that was a risk. The only things that I do regret are the decisions I made that involved no risk at all, that were the easy or the safe way to go. I wrote yesterday about one of my more obvious regrets that involved very little risk: attending an MFA in creative writing. The bigger risk would have been to trust myself and go it “alone” without the so-called support of a large institution.

    This followed on the heels of a different risk that I took that I do not regret: volunteering as a teacher in Karenni Refugee Camp on the Thai-Burma border. I’ve written a bit about my experiences there here and here.

    Some of the reasons why it was a risk was that it wasn’t strictly legal for non-refugees to be living there. And the job didn’t really come with the dressings of a job in the west: a contract, insurance, union rep, HR, running water, etc…. I wouldn’t really leave with references for my next job.

    Today, I’m still trying to sort out how I can write about my time there, how the risks involved barely register now compared to how I grew from being there. I wrote my whole creative writing thesis on the topic of my time there and some history of Karenni people. And I’ve tried to shop that writing around a bit. I’ve written a few things (here) about it that have been published.

    Ironically, I think that the in moving and teaching in the camp, I took the bigger risk and I have no regrets about it. Even though I was often “confined” to my house (concerns that the refugees would get in trouble with local authorities for “harboring” a foreigner), I felt a great expansiveness and even freedom. I felt that I could be present to myself in those moments. It was trying to return to the states and live more safely that I regret. “Safe” means small, narrow, confined. In the camp, I wrote on occasion, but not nearly as much as I did when I returned to the States and entered my MFA program. The difference was that my writing in the camp was just for myself. There was no judgement involved, just expression. Not so when I was studying writing.

    I hope that in this blog, I find more ways to write about my time in Thailand and specifically in the refugee camp in ways that feel expansive and freeing and, yes, maybe even a little risky. No. A lot risky.

  • Read, Write, Redefine

    Daily writing prompt
    Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?
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    I wish that twenty years ago, I had decided to read, write, and redefine on my own rather than going to an MFA program in creative writing.

    I learned recently that James Baldwin read through an entire library on his way to becoming the writer that he became. I wish I had done something similar. I certainly read a lot during my time in the creative writing program, sometimes as many as five books a week. But these were chosen by professors and instructors who were already, more or less, part of the literati. There were few women writers that we read. There were even fewer writers of color. For me, I was reading for the class I was in, to pass or, sometimes, to try to “impress” the instructor. I wish I had been reading for myself. I grew so used to reading for classes that once I was done with my MFA, it was many years before I started to read for pleasure. Even now, I sometimes have the thought while I’m reading that I’ll have to summarize or answer questions about it or respond to the writing in some way that will be acceptable to an instructor. I have to remind myself that I’m reading for only one person now: me.

    A similar thing happened to me with regard to my writing in my MFA program. All of the writing I was doing was for an audience outside of myself. I spent a lot of time and energy on trying to get it “right” and almost no time exploring, having fun, thinking my own thoughts. I was fixated on being a “good” writer, on receiving praise so that I never focused on what my writing was and was not doing for me. (Praise that I was never going to get.)

    At the time, I fell for the idea that I needed an MFA in order to write, in order to be “successful” and in order to have a community of writers. I thought that the degree would be a stamp of approval that would open up the world of writing and publishing. In other words, I’d fallen for an elitist way of thinking: hook, line, and sinker. I worked while I was in the program (three research fellowships) in exchange for tuition reduction. This was less time on my own writing. I spent hours and hours each work reading and responding to my classmate’s work. This, too, was time away from my own writing. And, honestly, it sometimes feels like that sort of workshop set up is actually just having students doing the professor’s work. I rarely received feedback from instructors that was truly, well, instructive. Each of them seemed to have an image in their minds of what was “good” writing and I either wrote towards that, earning accolades by the second or third submission when I’d decoded what they were looking for or, well, not.

    For one of my admissions essays I wrote, in all my earnestness, that I was looking for a “community” of writers. I didn’t realize that this was just me parroting what MFA programs claim to not only offer but exclusively so. I truly believed that these elite institutions were the only place that I could get support in my creativity. How naive! I’m sitting now, at my desk, with music on my phone, a scented candle lit, the sunlight hitting a handmade vase of flowers just so, the breeze playing with the grass and shadows playing with the outside my window. And all those many years ago, I thought that I had to climb into an ivory tower in order to access a creative community and the support I thought needed. Like I said: naive.

    So the last action I wish I had taken was: redefine. What do I wish I had redefined twenty years ago? Success, community, expression, support, reading, and, perhaps most of all, writing. I wish I had sat a minute and thought about what I really wanted and needed and that I had had the courage at the time to just give those things to myself rather than looking outwards to these institutions to give them to me. Well, here’s to hoping that it’s not too late to give those things to myself now.

  • I do my very best.

    Daily writing prompt
    How do you unwind after a demanding day?
    View all responses

    I try to not get wound up in the first place. Sometimes this means recognizing what I can and cannot control. It means that I try to have touch-points through the day when I can check in with myself.

    When I am getting wound up, I try to figure out a way to unwind myself as soon as possible. How? Moving, breathing, creating, eating, resting. I might go for a walk or just stretch a little, dance or shake it out. Check in with my breath. Sometimes I write in my journal. Practice the guitar. Listen to some music. Light a candle. Read a book or a poem.

    I recognize that it’s not the day that’s demanding, it’s myself that’s demanding of me. The demands I make of myself are completely in my control.

    I affirm myself. In every moment, every day, I’m one hundred percent confident that I did my very best because that’s what I tell myself. I have various phrases that I can go to if I’m having a hard time unwinding. I am alive. I am human. One I learned from Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley: I am no one’s savior. I am no one’s burden.

    Yesterday, I had various activities outside of the house. It might be have been a day that could be considered demanding. In the past, I likely would have come home and spent the evening fixating on how I did through the day and likely judging myself not too kindly. Maybe I was late arriving at different places. Maybe I didn’t get enough exercise. Maybe I was too chatty or not chatty enough; too helpful or not helpful enough. Oh! I shouldn’t have said that. Or maybe I should have said this. That person probably thinks I’m unkind or weird. I didn’t get enough reading done or clean the kitchen. With each thought, I’d wind myself up tighter and tighter.

    Instead, I wrote in my journal that I was really proud of myself for doing my best. And it’s true.

  • Is this what alignment feels like?

    Daily writing prompt
    How do you use social media?
    View all responses

    I’ve been responding to the daily writing prompt every day for about the last month or so. It hasn’t be a goal that I set, but it has played nicely into my larger goal of getting to one hundred posts. The daily prompts have gotten me into a nice rhythm of daily writing and posting, which I value and enjoy. Most days, I check the prompt in the first half of the day and then write my response later on. It being Easter, today has already felt like a full day. We spent most of the morning at my parents’ place for an egg hunt and lunch. I didn’t have the chance to check the question. And as we arrived home, I was having the internal debate, “do I want to post to the blog today?” It’s Sunday and even God rested. I was already pretty tired and wanted a nap.

    Well, turns out that all of these things are possible.

    I checked the daily prompt and saw that it was on a topic that I’d already posted about. No choice needed to be made! I promptly fell asleep on the couch and hopped on the computer once I woke up.

    Yesterday, I posted about rest. One of the things that I’ve realized is that when I’m doing something that I enjoy, it feels restful, even if it’s active. When I used to have to write for a deadline or for an assignment or for someone else or for money, it didn’t feel restful. I didn’t enjoy it. I was tense. It was draining. And so, for a long time, I believed that writing was something that exhausted me. It wasn’t the writing, it was the context, the subject matter, the lack of control and freedom. When writing is something that I choose, I find it energizing. And it turns out that the universe (or maybe at least word press) is in agreement. It sent me a daily prompt that I’d already answered, after all.

    So what does this have to do with social media? My previous post that I mentioned about was about how I took an indefinite time-out from social media. It ended up being a difficult sacrifice to make, but it was definitely the right choice. The daily prompt asks “How do you use social media?” “Use” is an important thing here. I don’t think I was using social media back when I was on it. I was allowing myself to be used by it. I wasn’t very active. I would scroll and scroll and rarely, if ever, would I create anything. I was very passive. Surprisingly, this also wasn’t restful. In fact, my brain was over-stimulating. Maybe one day I’ll have a reason to return to social media. If I do, I’m going to use it, not be used by it. It turns out that, for me, consuming is exhausting, and creating is energizing.

    ******************

    Here’s the text from my blog post about not using social media anymore, in case you don’t want to click through:

    I deleted Facebook years ago and Twitter a few after that. A few weeks ago, I the last of my social media apps: the mostly image-based Instagram and their partner text-based Threads. Social media, the whole of the internet, is, I believe, mostly a gift to the world. But my brain, my whole person was formed before the internet, much less social media, existed. In other words, I’m not equipped for handling it. My mind simply doesn’t move fast enough to keep up and, in attempting to, I was doing damage. It was as if I was lining up on the track next to Florence Griffith Joyner each and every day and expecting myself to keep up. My hamstrings – nay my whole body would have taken a beating if I ever even dreams of going up against Flo Jo but, more importantly, my self-esteem would have been obliterated. And it was. 

    I wasn’t too keen on the idea of deleting social media. The other day, my six-year-old son was staring out of the car window into the massive sky above. “Mom,” he said, “I don’t like to think about the universe.” I told him I get that. He confirmed that it’s the vastness that makes him feel small. It’s dark and lonely out there in the universe. I was so used to having and being on social media that I thought that deleting it would untether me from the earth and send me out there into the universe, alone, cold, and in the dark. 

    When I first came across posts on social media by patients in cancer treatment, it made me feel less alone.  Somehow, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t really looking for it, I’d come across people posting about their experiences with cancer. There was even a woman preparing for her mastectomy at around the same time that I was. I wasn’t alone. 

    Perhaps you can see where this is going. As soon as I clicked on a couple of cancer posts, the algorithm latched on. Soon, a good portion of my feed was cancer. And I couldn’t help myself but read and click. I’d try to close the app and just the c-word alone would catch my eye. I felt an obligation to consume it all. 

    One of the prayers that I had when I was going through treatment was this: that my suffering makes someone else’s a little less. There are certain aspects of Catholicism that are engrained in me and that’s one of them: offer it up. Offer up your suffering so that it has meaning if not for you, then at least for someone else. For the most part, I was thinking about my daughters in those moments, praying that somehow me going through all of these trials would save them from a similar fate. In the early days of my treatment, the genocide in Palestine was dire and so my prayers were also for mothers there. In my moments of pain rooted in my own body attacking my breasts, all mothers and children and their bonds and their bodies and suffering all became mixed together. 

    And some of that responsibility and connection carried over to my fellow cancer patients on social media. Somehow, it was my duty to keep reading all of these threads. But reading, engaging them seemed to created more until everything was cancer content. It’s about as much fun as it sounds. 

    This was all in the midst of me, in-person, going with some regularity to a literal cancer center where I would sit in waiting rooms nearly full with other people who possibly also had cancer. And at one appointment, my doctor mentioned (without violating HIPPA) that he’d been recently seeing more of the type of cancer that I have. Later, as I moved into the recurrence prevention phase, he mentioned that he had a patient in a very similar situation to me. At the very least, it’s possible that the doctor was able to use some of what he learned treating me to better care for the other woman. 

    These are connections that I couldn’t get on social media. 

    And so it was that I had it all wrong. When I finally cut the tether, I didn’t float out into the vast, cold universe. Rather, I floated back down to very real, solid, warm earth. 

    Visit my Ko-fi page to drop a tip in my cup.

  • Wait. What was the question again?

    Daily writing prompt
    Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
    View all responses

    This question reminds me of the fortune telling game that I used to play as a kid called “M.A.S.H.” It involved listing four options for your future in different categories. They were usually things like: career, first initial of your husband (it was usually girls we were playing with and very heteronormative), number of kids, income, names of cities, etc… The letters of the game stood for: mansion, apartment, shack , and house. And then some sort of little ritual was performed in order to come up with a number. The number dictated which items got crossed off each list under there was one item in each category remaining. Thus, our futures would be revealed to us. “You will be living in an apartment, married to someone whose name starts with a J, working as a nurse, earning $30,000 a year in Boston.”

    In retrospect, it was pretty unimaginative and actually a little depressing. Try as we might to include unexpected variables (types of pets! different countries! color of home!) it was difficult to come up with ideas outside of our experiences, what we could see. But I don’t think that that’s terribly unusual for kids.

    So, now, as an adult, how do I view this question of where I will be in ten years? It makes me feel like I’m sitting in a job interview and being evaluated.

    I checked the question this morning before I left the house and decided that I would think about it while I was out and write the answer on my return home, which at the time would be in a couple of hours.

    Today was a beautiful day. We went to the local Thai Temple to celebrate Thai New Year with family and friends and enjoy the performances and food. It’s not quite the country-wide celebration/ water fight that it is in Thailand, but it’s still fun. My daughters and I ended up spending several hours just sitting on the picnic blanket. We’d originally thought we’d go for an hour or so, just enough time to get some mango sticky rice and maybe a few others dishes. But we were enjoying it so much that several hours slipped by. Oh, and it turns out that Tammy Duckworth was there. So that was pretty incredible just to be near her and to hear her speak.

    On the drive back, I thought for a moment, “What was the writing prompt of the day for the blog?” For the life of me, I couldn’t remember. And it turns out, I’m glad I hadn’t thought about it the whole time we were gone. If I’d been focused on thinking about what’s going to happen in ten years, I would have missed the beautiful moments right in front of me.

  • The two jobs I already do for free: parenting and writing

    Daily writing prompt
    What job would you do for free?
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    Would I like to make money from both of these jobs? Sure! Who would say no to money? It’s the strings attached that I haven’t been able to accept.

    I pay to publish my writing here on this blog. Once upon a time, I paid for the privilege of writing in the form of graduate school tuition. (Guess which one costs more?) For brief periods of time I was paid to write. Although I didn’t really get to write what I wanted to. Other times, I’ve tried to get paid to write, but I just never seemed to be able to figure out what, exactly, publishers and editors were looking for in spite of all of the time and energy I put into trying to figure it out. Sometimes I even paid a few dollars for the privilege of having one of these publishers or editors take a look at my writing and decide whether or not it was what they wanted. It never was. My writing suffered for it. And as a result, I suffered for it. Always trying to guess at what these other people wanted meant that I spent very little time considering what I wanted.

    Octavia Butler worked what some would consider “menial” labor (as if there is such a thing) to support her writing. (For more information about Octavia Butler, her work, and her “work”, please read this essay by Dedria Humphries Barker.)

    I try to remember this whenever I taste a little bitterness at the thought that I don’t get paid for my writing, that I pay to publish. The good Lord didn’t bless me with the kind of discipline, the kind of commitment to her work that He bless Octavia Butler. He blessed me with the financial stability that allows me to do both of these jobs for free, few (or at least tolerable) strings attached.

    As for my job as a parent? Sure, it would be nice to be paid for that too. I try to call to mind all the women who weren’t (aren’t) allowed to raise their own kids because they had no choice but to raise other people’s kids.

    A blessing is a blessing no matter the relative size.

  • How do you improve a community that was someone else’s dream?

    Daily writing prompt
    How would you improve your community?
    View all responses

    I live next a six lane highway.  I am deeply resentful of it. The county I live in is one of the wealthiest in the country. My neighbors are mostly working and middle class and immigrants. The highway is maintained by the state (of Maryland) but the sidewalks on either side are the responsibility of the county. Except for when it snows, when it’s the responsibility of the individual home owners. Except for the bus stops, which might fall under the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Or maybe the county. It’s unclear. 

    I’m an average homeowner and resident but I know more about those inner workings of the roads because living at the intersection of a county road and a state highway necessitates it. When we first moved in here, there was no sidewalk in front of our house in spite of the fact that it’s right next to a bus stop. I spend a lot of time emailing and on the phone with various people trying to get a sidewalk installed. Representatives of the county tried very hard to dissuade me. I kept sending pictures of elderly people walking in the road to get to the bus stop. One of my neighbors was a wheelchair user at the time and I told anyone who would listen about the time that he called for a ride share because the medical building he needed to go to was inaccessible to him in spite of the fact that he can see said facility from his front porch. 

    A man was killed when he was struck by a driver crossing the highway (at a crosswalk) about a mile up the road. The audit of the intersection resulted in removing a small section of fence that stood between the sidewalk and the crosswalk button. 

    A driver ran her car off the road and hit the fence around my property. My children were playing on the other side at the time. Needless to say, a sidewalk with an appropriate curb would have stopped her. 

    Eventually they installed the sidewalk. It was one of my greatest victories. A few more crosswalks were put in where neighbors and I had requested them, mostly near the parks and schools. But not much was done to actually slow drivers on the highway on our surrounding residential streets. 

    But I was still emailing and calling and tweeting (this was back in the days when I was still using that site), trying to get the speed limit lowered on the highway or at least some speed cameras and enforcement. On many nights, I could lie in my bed and all I would hear was cars (many with modified mufflers) drag racing up and down the highway outside my house. I’d call the non emergency police number many nights. Little changed. 

    The highway we live on connects outer ring suburbs to downtown Washington, DC where the streets are largely laid out on a grid, except for these wider roads, which shoot out from the center of the city likes spokes on a wheel. The highway I live next to is one of these spokes. The next spoke over would potentially be just as inviting to drag racers, but the residents along that spoke are wealthy enough that they have their own private security force replete with speed cameras. So the drag racers converge on spokes like ours where the residents rely on the county and state for safety and security. 

    A little girl died two blocks from my house in a car crash that was a result of this drag racing. 

    Some time after that, the speed limit was lowered. Some time after that, speed cameras were installed. 

    Too late. 

    Once upon a time, this place might have been the American dream of the suburbs. Single family homes, green lawns all the way from the front door to the street. No need for sidewalks when Dad can just hop into the car and drive into the city for work! Hey! The developers even left out the curbs so that homeowners can decide where exactly to place the driveway! No need to think about the messiness of women and children or oh, I don’t know, poor people? (You know the people who build and care and clean to maintain these beautiful homes and offices and the roads that connect them?)

    My six year old loves nothing more than to punt a ball as hard and as high as he can. (Ok, maybe he loves lego slightly more.) The problem is that the ball often ends up over the fence and in the street. We take him to the park a few blocks away from time to time. It’s just a big open field and a large parking lot. There’s no playground (in spite of promises made by the county that one would be coming). Sometimes there are a few neighborhood kids there  but mostly it seems that people use it as a spot to pull off from the highway. I see people eating or sleeping in there cars there. Sometimes people are working on their cars. Once after a recent snow, three pick up truck drivers used the parking lot to film themselves spinning doughnuts. That was nice (/s). 

    I’m always tense walking there. In spite of the crosswalk, I still worry about drivers coming off the highway too fast. We have strict rules about where the kids can and cannot bounce the ball to minimize them ending up in the middle of one of the more dangerous streets. 

    The other evening, as we approached, we could hear music. Soon, a man sitting at one of the benches playing a saxophone came into view. 

    My son turned to me. “How does he play so good?” he asked. I didn’t know. 

    The sky was moody above us. We could see dark clouds gathering next to the field. And the man kept playing. The wind was picking up a bit. And the kept playing. And my son booted the ball to himself and kept chasing after it. And I tried to pause to listen to the music but also my son kept asking me to play with him, to kick the ball or throw it to him. And so sometimes I did. And the man kept playing his saxophone. And the clouds kept clustering. And the wind kept doing its thing. And it was a maybe a jazzy tune but maybe all saxophone sounds like jazz to me. And my son kept playing. And the wind blew the man’s sheet music about and he got up to collect it and we started to leave. And he shouted something at us. And I couldn’t hear him and maybe he said “Rhena!” But he smiled. So I did too. And the traffic didn’t slow. No one came back to life. The drivers didn’t stop and exit their cars and pick up litter or even stop to listen. And he kept playing even as we walked away and even through the first drops of rain. 

  • Damn, WordPress, you really got me deep into self reflection today, don’t you?

    Daily writing prompt
    When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
    View all responses

    When I was five, I wanted to be an artist when I grew up.

    My parents owned a restaurant in those days and I didn’t go to preschool. I spent a lot of time in the offices on the second floor of their business where my mom would be handling paperwork as the manager. Even once I was in Kindergarten, I usually spent parts of my summer days there.

    There wasn’t much for a kid to do at the restaurant but there was a stack of thick beige paper that my parents used to print menus and flyers on. And somehow, there usually were markers or crayons around. I went through an abstract phase: drawing long looping lines and then coloring in the shapes that emerged as the lines crossed each other. This phase could have been an entire summer or it might have lasted a few hours. Time and memory. You know how these things mix up, and especially in the mind of an abstract artist five year old.

    I do remember announcing that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. In spite of the fact that I spent so much time in my family’s place of business, I still had a five year old’s understanding of things like jobs and careers. What did I know of galleries and studios and monetization and starving? All of that was even more abstract than my looping lines.

    At times, I told my dad that I wanted to be a doctor. I planned on attending Harvard Medical School. Or so I said. I was mostly saying this type of thing to please the adults. And while “doctor” might have been closer to making grown-ups happy, “artist” was closer to making me happy. This is why what I really think I was getting at when I claimed that I wanted to be an artist is that I wanted to spend my life expressing myself and perhaps that I hoped that as an adult, there would always be space for that.

    Well, I’m not a doctor, so the need to please adults didn’t win out. But has my life otherwise turned out the way that five year old Rhena hoped? Although there have been long stretches where I haven’t, I now paint and draw semi-regularly. And as a five year old, I couldn’t write well enough to picture it as part of my future. But I’m writing now. And while it’s taken me a long time, I’m creating ever more space for self expression.

    In the meantime, my six year old son regularly announces that he IS an artist. There is no future dreaming about it. He is what he is in this moment. And I think I created space in his life for him to express himself now. So, yeah, five year old Rhena is very proud.

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    If you’d like to support this artist in living out her five-year-old dreams for herself, please visit my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! (Also, shares, likes, and poking around the other posts helps too!)