Last spring, at a witchy gathering in a friend’s backyard, I looked up from my journal and saw two women sitting back-to-back in this way that left me awash in feelings and at a loss for words. I fixed my gaze on them, loosened my grip on my pen, and attempted to capture what I saw with a rough sketch. The instinct to draw instead of write (and it was an instinctive thing) was unusual; drawing is a newly (re)discovered outlet for me, not a skill in which I have tremendous confidence. I flirt with drawing like I used to–and probably still do–with people I think are out of my league.
How does one flirt with drawing? Don’t look at the page while you do it. Don’t apply yourself to it so that you always have an out (I wasn’t really trying) if someone tells you it’s not that good. Don’t get too interested in it, or else your limitations may begin to disappoint you. Keep it casual and don’t need anything from it, so it can’t hurt you. I know this because drawing is one of many creative pursuits–knitting, collage, watercolor, cooking, sewing, gardening–that I’ve worked hard to shield from the judgments of the world and, more importantly, from my ambitious nature.
Weeks after I drafted that sketch under a cloudless April afternoon sky in my friend’s backyard, I started reading Lynda Barry’s book Making Comics. In the introductory pages, Barry explains that every person has a line, an unencumbered connection between their heart and their hand that is uniquely theirs. After years of teaching thousands of students, she describes how she can find a scrapped drawing at the end of a semester and know, confidently, who drew it. Why is it, Barry wonders, that if we met a three or four-year-old child who said they couldn’t (or didn’t want to) draw, sing, make up stories, or dance–the building blocks of self-expression–we would be very concerned. Yet, when we encounter this kind of blockage in adults, we accept it as normal, expected even.
I read the first dozen pages of her book with tears in my eyes and spilling down my face; her words landed like an urgent invitation to clear away the rubble of fears and expectations heaped on top of my line by myself and others. It’s not that I have no sense of my line; it pulses with desire when I participate in expressive activities. I know because I can feel it. But I’ve also felt the intensity of my resistance to self-expression, let alone the fog of horror that often rolls in after an enthusiastic bout of it.
Later that spring, I attended a fundraiser for a local dance studio–a showcase by students from their various classes and programs. Watching the youngest kids (maybe five years old) dance, I could see their lines. Though they learned from the same teachers, each performed in distinctly their own way. There was the kid fixated on the choreography, carefully watching his neighbors. The kid who mostly swayed, staring at one spot (probably a person) in the audience, smiling big and bright, reflecting love and enthusiasm into the crowd. The kid who seemed checked out but came alive each time they arrived at the song’s chorus. The kid who lost themselves in the vibration of the music or the way the movement felt in their body. Their lines, their way in the world, were plainly on display.
It was easy to watch, move, and connect with them as if their expression made space for my expression. They made it look fun and like being distinct from one another within the overall sweep of performing as a group was not a problem; in fact, it might have been the point. As the program progressed, the dancers moved up in age, and those bright, pulsating lines got dimmer and dimmer. Eventually, I noticed I was no longer moving, that my body and face, once relaxed and easy, had gone taut, tight even. By the time we got to the tweens, ballet took the stage, and I’m not sure if it was the nature of the dance or the dancers’ age, but the stakes were suddenly elevated. I couldn’t see anyone’s line or connect with the dancers; their movement was less of an invitation and more of a performance.
Driving home that afternoon, I was bereft thinking about all the lines out there that get buried or stifled by conformity, fear, and shame.
What might be possible if my line was less burdened by hesitation each time I considered dancing, drawing, singing, or getting dressed for a party? The overlord of my self-expression is constantly leaning over my shoulder, ready with a comment, correction, or warning–that will look strange, it’s wrong, don’t move that way, that’s definitely not a thing. I’m constantly scheming, trying to figure out how to give my fearmongering overlord the slip so I can let go and try something shaky, something nascent that doesn’t know what it is yet.
Whenever she noticed that her students were getting shy or self-conscious, my favorite yoga instructor of all time would say, “Close your eyes so no one can see you.” The first time I heard her say it, I was so fixated on whatever my body was or wasn’t doing that it took me a second to get the joke. Since then, I’ve recalled that message countless times to remind myself to laugh in tense moments but also to access parts of myself that I’m resistant to surfacing around other people. I’ve watched (and followed along with) workshops by Lynda Barry where she employs the same close-your-eyes technique, and the results are wonderfully weird and exuberantly joyful.
When I look at my drawing of the two women on a bench all these months later, I experience the same constellation of feelings I did that afternoon. Love. Connection. Intimacy. Interdependence. Capaciousness. Aliveness. Tenderness. Safety. Freedom. I could’ve reached for those words at the time, but something inside me knew better than to get into it with a story just then. I remember looking at the sketch right after drawing it; I mostly saw what I’d left out–faces, a background, hands. But then, weeks later, I caught a glimpse of it in my journal as I flipped in search of a blank page and noticed how the sleeve of the smaller figure’s shirt looked like feathers around the cuff and thought, “Yeah, they looked like they had the support they needed to push off and fly.” That feathery wing feeling wouldn’t have made it through the strictures of my wordy, thinking mind or past the meticulous overlord of judgment because it doesn’t make literal sense.
Though the women in my drawing are solidly in middle age, I can see in my sketch their eight-ness, twenty-six-ness, forty-five-ness, and on and on. I could see their lines that day and can also see them in my drawing, captured with my own weird line. There was a wildness to them–blankets slung over their shoulders, the rumpled fabric of their clothes, hair tussled and wispy around their faces–yet each was firmly grounded by the soft and sturdy back of the other. Maybe that’s what happens when I close my eyes. I can sense my own back, soft and sturdy, braced for me to push off and take flight.
While working on this piece last week, I wondered repeatedly if it was timely or relevant enough. As serendipitous forces would have it, I encountered a couple of voices I admire discussing overlapping themes. That was the little nudge of encouragement I needed to see it through.
If this post spoke to you for any reason, I recommend these things:
Wendy MacNaughton’s TED talk for its potent message: Drawing is looking, and looking is loving.
Roxanne Gay, on the podcast We Can Do Hard Things, around the 40-minute mark, gets into the bit about how she sometimes unravels her confidence in her ideas as she’s writing them down. Right before that, she’s talking about accountability and redemption on the internet- also worth a listen!
And the magic of Lynda Barry’s Drawing Together workshop she conducted for people in the Graphic Medicine (a rabbit hole worth exploring on its own) community during the pandemic lockdown.
Love this. And I especially love the mermaid drawing-- so like the manatee ppl think those dazed and desperate sailors took for gentle, curious women.
I get so stiff and expectant of “my line,” i constantly hope it will turn out to be somebody else’s. It is why i hide in printmaking weirdly: the deferral of instantaneous marks; the refusal of preciousness that is embodied in the multiple.
So appreciate your thoughts!
And maybe you said this but i missed it in my eagerness to read-the back to back women form a heart shape where they meet.