Dreams
…and on not giving up
The daily sorting is after the 💖💖💖 and the prompt writing after the 🔙🔙🔙
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(A close up part of a mural that graced a giant piece of the wall in Curious & Kind created by Blake Chamberlain based on the story of Nelly Thurston-Squire, the first woman to go up in a hot air balloon by herself in Canada which happened just outside of Almonte, Ontario over a hundred years to the day that Blake started painting it…it’s now under paint, and it breaks my heart)
Tell me about a project you abandoned
Here, if I hadn’t written the prompt, I might ask the person prompting to define their terms. What does abandoned really mean. Is it quitting something. Is it turning your back on a project you loved. Is it giving up? Is it just plain forgetting that you started something and finding it later only partially accomplished?
Or is it becoming so frustrated with the state of the project that you upend it, like a monopoly game you’re not winning, flipping the board in anger.
Or could it be abandoning something if you hand it gently over to people you know will take better care of it, and letting go, and trusting that your presence is no longer needed for the project to continue.
Or…maybe…the project abandons you.
All of these things could describe a thing I’ve done.
I used to say that the one thing I’m really good at…is quitting.
An incomplete list of things I’ve quit:
ballet class (at age 6 because the teacher was mean and I did not love dancing)
Piano lessons (at age 8 because I actually really wanted to play the drums and had only taken piano lessons because it was a condition of getting my Casio keyboard)
Brownies (which is now called Embers, a part of the Girl Guide program in Canada, because…I didn’t like getting dressed up in the outfit, or the demand of earning badges for things I was already good at and they weren’t really teaching me)
The Baptist Church (which I had joined against my parents wishes at age 9 because of a girl, and because I loved singing, but Jesus and I had a falling out when he didn’t bring me the giant stocking from the Saan Store window at Christmas that year…likely because Jesus does not succumb to the demands of a nine year old who thinks he’s Santa, or because he doesn’t exist…I don’t know, I became agnostic soon after)
Singing lessons (I never really got to sing what I wanted to sing)
Piano lesson (again. That teacher was terrifying. Like a Bond villain. White poofy cat and all.)
The Red Plague (probably because I had to work to get out of the town I lived in, I loved that band so much)
Teenage relationship after teenage relationship after…you get it. I had a three month limit though. So I wouldn’t get stuck in that town.
My family. I left them when I was 18. To start my own life. I quit my town. Because I didn’t fit and I couldn’t really be my whole self without consequences.
Job, after job after job after job (because…sometimes…I was too good at them. And my co-workers did not like that I was so hyper-focused on being good at my job, and then would often get mean and unpleasant and ask me to stop caring so much and “making them look bad”. Which is why I tend to like to work alone…or for myself.)
Playing a lead role in Tartuffe (I was actually forced to quit because the director was…a drunk jerk and had a hate-on for me and was mad she cast me…and I ended up giving up on being an actor because of the whole debacle. I did finish my BA in English/Theatre/Film degree though. I have the diploma and everything)
A band (they actually kicked me out without telling me and tried to steal my drum kit, which I then sold to an upstart 15 year old out of spite, and because I had no place to store it. I miss that kit. All the time.)
Taiko drumming (not because I wanted to, but because a different project took precedence)
Running a poetry collective (because I gave it my all and burned out, and knew it would be better cared for by someone else)
Running a comedy room (see above)
Producing a satellite storyslam of The Moth (this one broke my heart to do because I loved it so much, but I was moving back to Canada, and the amount of work vs how much the organization compensated me was…insulting. It was servitude and felt gross after awhile even though it brought me joy. If it had been a volunteer position…I would have felt less taken advantage of…because it would have been on my terms…but watching how much the org raked in at their events, and knowing how little they paid the people running the events…*sigh*)
Community radio. Thrice. Even though it’s one of the loves of my life. Each time because I was moving.
The federal government and my mostly completed communications degree because I realized I didn’t want to spin for the government AND because I got too much work done in too little time and my manager refused to give me a reference even though I had negotiated the terms of the contract to work half time so I could be volunteer coordinator at the radio station that summer. She was surprised I’d completed all my objectives and more in half the time. But…that’s not how the government works, she said. You have to put in the time. It’s not about efficiency. Yep. So I decided to go into teachers college instead.
Teaching (because I took it too seriously and gave my entire life to my class and knew I would disappear into being a teacher and burn out…but for the two years I did it. It was magic. Or rather the students were magic and shared that magic with me. It was one of the hardest most beautiful experiences in my life.)
I have to admit…that leaving things has allowed me to do other beautiful things…and when I write this prompt I had just intended to talk about the abandoned art project I’d found in a drawer just this week when I was unpacking. But then the prompt prompted this.
This is an incomplete list. Because it would take me days to itemize all the things be left behind.
All the things I’ve been forced out of because of capitalism and the fact that I needed to make money…
Here’s a not-so-secret.
I hate being paid. I hate the expectations that come with being paid. The ownership that person paying you has over you, your life, your time.
I would work for free, always, if I could. So that the demand was not there.
Do I appreciate being compensated for my time? Only because the system we live in requires it.
I have managed to get around being paid for so long by becoming a parent, for which there is no pay, and looking after my children who are the true loves of my life. But I am not a traditionalist:
I did not have children thinking I wouldn’t go back to work.
I just really loved being a parent. I loved helping my kids learn, and learning from them. When I had to choose between parenting, my marriage and doing things for myself and my community (comedy, storytelling, activism)..,I chose parenting and the things I needed to stay true to myself. I asked to changed the terms of our marriage. I asked if we could focus our limited energies on our kids.
And gratefully their Dad agreed.
And I quit trying to be something I was not. Straight. A person with a binary gender. A wife.
I had so many years of being messy in my cocoon. I came out of my Seattle experience a weird sort of faerie.
When I moved back to my heart home, the town I loved and had my children in, I was a closer version to the person I wanted to be.
And I started Curious & Kind. The dream space I’d been planning since I was a child. Is written the business plan at 16.
A place where people could go to belong. I wanted to be a Concuerge of Dreams. (Not a job, I was told over and over)
But I did it. THRICE.
The first time I rented a building a was screwed over by the landlords of a space that wasn’t fit for the uses I’d rented it for. They took ALL the money I’d raised in my fundraising campaign, and I cried EVERY DAY. Eventually a lawyer advised me to stop paying them because I’d done everything in my power to find them a new tenant as per the lease, and they’d turned down full viable candidates in order to keep taking my money. That business was actuallcalled Ephemeroptera. Which is ironic and funny if you look up what it means.
The second iteration was the first Curious & Kind. I started it on June 12th, 2019. My 40th birthday. It was to be a venue for community gatherings and for NINE months it was magic. We had playgroups, crafting nights, performances, festivals, markets, an indigenous arts day…my kiddo and I would go in and dance during the day to old County Basie records. I had a gorgeous mutual painter on the walk. My friends helped me paint it. We had a chair-raiser. A local play rehearsed there. Bagpipers rehearsed there. There were writing classes. Comedy classses. I did child care on market nights where the kids could come and do art projects while their families shopped. We poured soap. Recorded podcasts. Facilitated friendships.
It was an expensive space to rent, and in February 2020 I found another business to pay half. She would run a co-working space during the day, and I would run events at night and on the weekends. It was about to be sustainable.
Then March 13th, 2020 happened. And my partner was living in Seattle, as were so many of my friends…and I had seen what was coming. I closed the space. Immediately. I did not want to be responsible for people becoming sick.
I continued to pay one quarter of the rent until October 2020. I had released the woman who was supposed to help pay for the space…because it wasn’t fair. She hadn’t even gotten started.
My landlord applied for the government relief. He paid 25%, I paid 25%, and he collected the rest from the government. But…I couldn’t see an end in sight.
So on October 2020 I cried on his doorstep and asked if he would let me out of my lease. He was so kind. He told me he really believed in me.
By the end of 9 months, and the first attempt of Ephemeroptera I had sunk $65 000 into that dream.
I was heartbroken.
All I wanted to do was build a community that wasn’t based on capitalism. And Covid took that from me.
I didn’t abandon Curious & Kind because I wanted to…but because I had to.
I threw myself into parenting. Into making that time of our lives magic.
Oof.
I didn’t know that this prompt was going to bring the deluge.
Maybe you already know this story. If so. You can stop reading here. Go about your day. It’s a heavy one. Losing a dream can crush a person’s spirit. It can almost kill them.
But I had my children. And I have always had a fierce will to love, and an oppositional nature.
I say I’m a quitter. But when I love something. I don’t give up.
I have never and will never quit my children. I will never ever give up on my dream to build something beautiful. Not really. Curious & Kind isn’t a place (as one of my friends said after the third and what I thought would be the final iteration of Curious & Kind) it’s in all of us.
They said that because in 2021, only three months after I nearly died of a lateral medullary stroke, from which it took me a month to walk, and so much work to recover…(and I still have the unfortunate side effect of it taking me longer to put new people into my long term memory…but I found out I can do it!)..,
I rented ANOTHER space for Curious & Kind. It was this wondrous little 700 square foot space that only cost $600 a month to rent, on the main business street of the town.
…and I started to rebuild. It was going to have to be different. I didn’t have the energy to run big events anymore. So the dream morphed.
It became a space in which dreams were possible. Where friendships and adorable monster dioramas were made. Where people could come sit for a spell, tell a story, write some poetry, felt something…belong. I wish I could tell you all the magical stories of the incredible things that happened in that space from November 2021-June 2023. Maybe I’ll just share some pictures. Because it does feel like a dream now.
(The wondrous crew that spent a lot of time in the space and helped facilitate We Wonder Wednesdays, they are all still friends!)
(After a birthday party for one of the humans who helped run a cafe on Mondays in the space…so I could take the day off (but I inevitably showed up because they made the place such a magical place to visit and I loved being there when it was in their care 🥰)
(Two of my favourite people in front of the space during Puppets Up!)
(The soap pouring shelf)
(The Curious & Kind couch, donated by the public library)
(During a monster making workshop put on by the incredible humans from Hit Point Press)
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…I am nearing my word limit!
And it’s now morning (I started this at 4am)…so I’ll write more tomorrow. Because Curious & Kind is on its way to getting a third chance (third times the charm, yes?!) at life in Lunenburg. We are looking at buildings next week.
Because I’m still not ready to give up on this dream.
Heart,
Wake
Here you go, Wake: A project abandoned. - And the process of recollection was enjoyable, so thank you for the prompt. :-)
Long ago - surely it is one or two lifetimes - long ago, I was in my early twenties and was having my second go at really, properly learning how to knit. THIS TIME, I was going to do it PROPERLY.
As a child (told I was clumsy, and known for not having brilliant fine motor skills) I'd gotten as far as plain or garter stitch with knitting, doing the wonky squares and scarves that have wobbly sides, not only due to stopping stitches but also not having consistent tension, or something. Probably I held it differently each time I took it up. That's only just now occurred to me, as I now know that how well I can hold a pencil or pen is quite a variable thing for me. On some days, the pen is held lightly and I can write neatly for a while - for a while. On others: no, no neat writing today. Today, we have tension and wobbles and it's a Scrawly Day. Hand and arm will not co-operate.
Ah: I remember crafts as a kid. Quite quickly, I got the idea that I was bad at it, because I would get impatient to finish, rush the job and end up with... well, you can picture it, I'm sure. The crooked creature made with corks, matchsticks and glue. The drawings that never pleased me or anyone else. The clay work from school that was always irregular and never, ever neat: the coil pot that had uneven sides, even as a round thing. I think my dear mum, 86 today, still has the solid blue clay dice (die?) that I made in high school and gave to her. Hah - it took ages to dry through, and it is... wonky! - But she had kept it, and not even lost it, which probably I would have done, even if I tried to keep it. It is a good book-end.
There was a badge that I undertook to gain, for Girl Guides: something to do with loving books, the criteria for which I attained easily, except for one: I had to repair or re-cover a book. My feedback on that one eventually taught me a new expression: "skew-whiff". Thinking it was a sentence filler like "ummm...", I used it like that, until told what it really meant; then and only then did I fully understand what the assessor was trying to convey about my book repair! - But I got the badge to sew - probably crookedly - onto my uniform sleeve; a badge with a book, and that was all that mattered! :-)
Knitting: an earnest try in late teens or early twenties, I think. I learned how to do basic stocking stitch. Being impatient for length, I knitted a long, thin strip of reasonable evenness, and then had the vision: I would knit a jumper (sweater) like this! - In a long spiral of stocking stitch, all different colours. I kept the project in an old, vinyl travel bag, and would forget about it for a while, rediscover it, have a renewed go at the project, then forget about it again.
At some point during the knitting of The Potential Spiral Jumper, I got married and moved house. A few years of chaos passed; did I ever rediscover that project? There were, eventually, a number of moves and currently I have absolutely no idea whether I still have the bag, and whether the Potential Spiral Jumper is still intact or, as is likely, consumed by moth larvae over the years.
Poor Potential Spiral Jumper: doomed to not exist due to a combination of distraction, impatience, low skill, and the whole thing about I-don't-see-it-and-therefore-I-forget-it-exists.
Oh: and to be kind to myself: I know now, decades on, that I was an autistic woman, trying to manage a household, and to work, and to raise two brilliant autistic kids, with an autistic partner, none of us with diagnoses or support.. and just constantly overwhelmed with life. - So there were no brain cells left for the Potential Spiral Jumper. I wonder what happened to it?
I guess it now has existence as a concept. :-)
There is a happy postscript:
For the last decade or so of my work language teaching, I got heavily into storytelling, creating illustrations for my mad stories with touch screens that forgivingly erased multiple wonky lines. Sometimes I would draw at work, going through a student's recount of a holiday or something in the target language, and drawing nutty cartoonish pictures to go with the story. Not only did I love this process, but the kids loved it, too. I think part of the reason was that they were NOT good drawings, and that left them feeling encouraged to have a go themselves. - That, and their weird flatness made them laugh.
There were, in the end, quite a few stories with my trademark flat, cartoony characters in them, and a couple got made into "proper books" with comprehensible text in the target language, and often humour. Not published or anything; just through those businesses that make photo books for your family.
Since beginning those drawings, I have discovered that actually having a scribble on the laptop touch screen is quite enjoyable. I keep on drawing, from time to time, mainly for the process. Now: where has the stylus gone? I'll find it one day. :-)
I have some wonderful memories of the kids playing Stella Stella Ola during a playdate in that space as well as seeing DeAnne Smith perform. I am looking forward to seeing the new space when we visit Lunenburg. The fact that it is so close to a place we visit often (my in laws live there) feels very serendipitous!