Living as Curating

If this were spring in Minnesota, I would call up one of my beercan philosopher favorites (you know who you are) and brave the slush to take a ramble down by the Mississippi and have a chat about all the weird feelings we feel. Yours and mine. Right now, mine are like this:

I think I have lived my life like a curator. I spend a lot of time by myself, processing all the detail I gulp up from around me. Some little fragments of it I spend feeling like I am bad at making and keeping friends, but more and more I do not allow myself those feelings. Because: shy though I might be, I am a 22 year old woman and one thing I have learned is that shy may be a serious disability, may be a lifelong struggle, may be part of a panic or anxiety disorder that you take pills to help with, may cause you to lose lots of opportunities along the way - but it is not something that other people can or should cut you slack for. It is your own problem, and you are the only one who is going to solve it. By doing things that make you uncomfortable. All the time. The discomfort might ease, or not. Once shy, always shy, no matter what it looks like. I have had lots of other things causing me discomfort of late, and have been not so good at bucking up on the shy front. It means I have seen hardly any people for six weeks, and it is nobody's fault but my own.

This is why I try to give people who seem cold the benefit of the doubt. And people who seem really brash. 99% of them are just shy people trying to reform.

(Did You Know: Dennis Rodman spends a lot of time in his autobiography Walk on the Wild Side talking about how he is actually shy, and his whole spectacle is about proving all the amazing variety of things that a shy person can do when they put their mind to it. Dennis Rodman was also best friends with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam (another shy person!!!) when he wrote this book. He had also just broken up with Madonna (Madonna was never shy).)

In any case, curating. Living. Living as curating. Time alone.

Reflecting, I realize that I spend a lot of my time alone doing this. Organizing my thoughts and stories and the things I have heard and seen and felt. Curating. Archiving. I gather all my memorized moments and all the dreams I have had and remembered and even all of the strange gaps and incongruancies in myself and my life, and I make the growing-up if not quite grown up version of all my childhood hours spent making lists of names, floorplans of imaginary houses, outfits of imaginary groups of friends, guest lists of imaginary bat mitzvahs (we weren't Jewish, but man did I want that kind of magic party celebrating my adolescence), day by day itineraries of imaginary backpacking trips to Southeast Asia. I take all the bits and pieces, ephemera and quotidiana of my lived life, and pretty it, arrange it into shelves and drawers, front and back rooms. I think about who my audience is, who has been coming into my gallery, if you will, and who my buyers are and what buyers I am trying to attract, and curate exhibits for them, that I think they will like and be charmed by. Or, if they need it, comforted by, healed by. Convinced by, educated by, helped to feel proud by, on special occasions flummoxed or stunned or seduced by. I spend my time alone curating my life just so and then when I am out in the world, I am ready for the windows and drawers to be opened, to open them, to show the right people the things that will please and/or surprise them.

This is why people tell me that I am good at writing, public speaking, school, giving tours of things, and retail.

It is also why no one except the very well trained can ever tell when I am treading a dangerous edge.

This is to say that I also spend a lot of time when I am in a group of people who are talking listening and storing information for later use. It is not to say that I am some sort of social genius/wunderkind. Patently false. I am the biggest fumbler, especially with new people, blushing or silent, my voice cracking, and if you don't stop me I will tell you something I've told you before. I will see in your face that I've told you before, maybe even remember when, but I will be too awkward to stop telling you.

Bet it'll be a little different the second time, too. Often exact truth gets lost in memory. It is less like a film and more like a series of snapshots taken over the course of an evening. There are blanks that need filling. Who ever said that stories are supposed to be true, anyway?

There is a man who is an alcoholic (recovered or not, I'm not sure) who spends time, at times, with my grandmother and aunts in Wisconsin. He is one of these mysterious people who turn up at Eagle Springs Lake, maybe someone's ex-boyfriend, who is just around. He takes beautiful photographs and tells the same stories over and over again. "It's that alcoholic thing, that they learn in rehab, you know?" said my dad, once, when I mentioned that the whole time we had been trying to eat custard and watch Ali G this man had been telling the same story he had told us the last time we saw him.

It might be an alcoholic thing, but I do it, too.