It’s October. I’m at my parents’ house, the house my dad built with his own hands from the ground up. I lived in this house from age 2 until I moved out at 25. But I’ve had roots on the property since before I was born. Like any good child, I left some (many) things for my parents to remember me by when I moved out. Much of it was in the attic, packed away and forgotten about.
My parents have talked about moving for years now. Now that they’re pursuing a move with renewed energy, it’s time for me to lighten their load.
We brought down 20-30 boxes from the attic, and a handful of trash bags that almost disintegrated on the way down the ladder. As expected, I found some late-90s and early-2000s gems. And a lot of garbage.
But in those boxes, I found something I wasn’t expecting at all.
Me, looking back at me.
My Authentic Self
Of course, it would make sense that I would find myself in those boxes in the attic. Not just items that I recognized, but clear personality traits and habits echoing through time. But I was unprepared for how much of my young self is still visible in my adult self.
There’s this assumption that as we grow up, we change. That we’re not the same people we were when we were small. And we do, sort of. However, the true essence of who we are is almost always evident in our childhoods.
I Am Creative
Woven throughout my life are some very clear threads. The desire to create has been in me since the beginning. There were so many notes and papers, in wide print or wobbly cursive, of stories. Some, going back when I was 3 or 4 years old.
Naturally, I found loads of journals and notebooks, but there were some other projects as well. My first sewing box, some sewing practice, and more than one camera. I found basic sketches of my family and me, next to a house that was the same size as the people. There were some really bad attempts at drawing. But I was trying.
I found a box of old dance costumes, set aside for any children who might want to play dress up. It’s clear that a desire to create and express myself has been present with me from the beginning. But I never thought to look for it in my childhood. I didn’t realize how deep it ran.
I Am A Collector
In childhood, I was also a keeper of precious things. I loved boxes and containers to hold other, smaller things. Notes from friends, “important” stickers, and tiny trinkets were in almost every box. Nearly every award, medal, and trophy I ever received was up there, too.
Even now, I have a propensity to hold on to things I deem precious. Physical things, like a small, smooth rock my oldest hands to me on a walk, still rattle around the bottom of my backpack. Or a ticket stub from a museum we really enjoyed. I have envelopes of leftover currency from trips we’ve taken to other countries.
But also emotional things. Almost every day, I find myself noticing and storing up small things. At breakfast, I look into my children’s eyes, trying to memorize their small faces. As they play, I watch them and write down funny phrases they say, gathering and storing the small moments that make up our days.
From my writing couch, I look out the window and watch a bird sitting on the fence. I watch it until it flies away, off on another adventure. I listen in on conversations at the coffee shop and silently celebrate friendship and community. When days get hard, I use these stored precious things to remind me that, really, it is a lovely world we live in.
I Am Adventurous
The boxes also show me that my interest in other cultures and travel runs deep. I was keen to read books by people with perspectives different from mine. I’ve always been interested in how other people experience the world.
As a teen, I’d mark my travels in small collections. Mostly shot glasses and key chains, although there was a time when I collected spoons. These days, my collections look a little different. Since college, I’ve worked to collect my own memories while traveling. I have journals for specific trips, a feeble attempt to chronicle all I saw and did. Now, I gravitate towards art and jewelry. Incidentally, these days I wear very little jewelry, but I still like searching for and purchasing pieces that feel like me.
I Am Letting Go of Perfection
Of course, I also found some less desirable character traits in the boxes. At times, I have a hard time finishing projects. There were plenty of journals with only the first 10 pages written in. I found a box of partially sewn doll clothes and materials from long-forgotten attempts at learning to crochet.
The boxes revealed how deep my anxiety and fear of failure actually run. One entire box I opened was nothing but graded worksheets from a year of elementary school. Who knows why I saved them. Maybe I was too overwhelmed to throw them out. Maybe I thought I would use them to play school during the summer vacation. Or, just maybe, I kept them because the grades were good.
For much of my life, particularly while I was in school, I measured my worth by my performance. The more I could balance and excel at, the more worthy I was. On some level, it’s possible I kept those papers to remind myself I was good at something. That someone saw my work, gave it a grade, and therefore also said I was ok.
The item that really brought that desire for perfection to the forefront of my mind was an Illustory book project. The premise was that you wrote and illustrated a story on the pages provided, mailed them in, and the company bound them into a hardback book. I never got past the cover page, which I wrote on when I was 10. I remember being terrified it wouldn’t be perfect, that I would send it out, hate it, and wish I could do it again. Or maybe worse yet, that I’d never done it in the first place.
As I was writing this post, I also wondered if some of the desire for perfection stemmed from the pieces of the kit being a finite resource – once the materials were used, they were gone. Not so much that I was afraid to try, maybe, but that I was afraid of the result being permanent. That I wouldn’t have a do-over if I didn’t like the outcome.
I Am Who I Have Always Been
Looking back, the fear of failure and desire for perfection that I carried in my early years have become increasingly apparent. It’s not so much that I was afraid to try, although that was some of it. There was plenty of evidence of failed attempts. But I didn’t want to fail publicly. Perception is reality, and I wanted people to think I had it altogether, that I knew what I was doing.
And while fear is certainly still present in my adult life, it’s not as present. Some of that comes from doing a lot of work to let go of the idea that my worth is tied to my performance. While I still have a hard time with rest, I’m much more willing and able to recognize that need when it arises.
I didn’t realize how deeply ingrained some of these things were. I didn’t know these were core pieces of me, going back farther than I can remember. Sometimes we can’t see who we really are because we are too close to it. It’s only in looking back that we realize who we are is who we’ve always been.
We are who we’ve always been. I find comfort in that idea. We are created beings, knit together with specific personalities and traits.
While change is possible, there are threads that run throughout our histories. And these threads, when we recognize them, can tell us a lot about ourselves.
