White Mane (1953), Directed by Albert Lamorisse
I’m better at feeling the my relationship to a place, or a moment, in retrospect, once it has passed. I’m not very good at being effortlessly conscious, or present, because I’m too busy being greedy about it, absorbing every smell, sight, tactile sensation of the experience. Pocketing it away to feed my inner memory eating nostalgia plant. A monster like Audrey II, the insatiable carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors, who has wrapped itself around my bones composting the nutrients of these experiences into my system until time, place, and memory aren’t separate things but a part of who I am on a deep level.
And then I vomit it all out onto the page. This is called “world building.”
I find it amusing when you discover the thing that you have done your whole life is given a technical term. Third Culture Kids and Adults do this reflexively. Our inner worlds are built from living in different countries, experiencing cultures that aren’t ours and assimilating them into ourselves. Often, the creation of these worlds is rooted in the need for one that doesn’t change because it can only exist within, protected from time.
At a very young age, I learned to notice all the details of a place and experiences like a living recording device. Once I had a moment to myself, I would spend hours replaying it and that was when the emotional connections would truly surface. I was a space head and all the adults in my life believed and feared it, except my mother.
My elementary school teachers suggested I suffered from ADD. At the time, it explained why live-to-work baby boomers couldn’t connect with their children who weren’t going to fit neatly into a cubicle. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided in the DSM-III that quiet kids didn’t have to be disruptive to have the disorder (they later reversed course). My parents got the ADD welcome packet and a prescription for Ritalin, hottest drug on the market. Mom said fuck that.
She was convinced that I just needed an outlet so, the games began! Tennis, soccer, swimming, ballet, biking, gymnastics, running around the house - did I mention ballet? Yeah, more on collecting trauma another time. It was fun, but it didn’t quite get the job done. Drawing did, reading did and then, thanks to my second-grade teacher Mrs. McGinniss, poetry and writing. Add a healthy dose of French cinema (my parents accidentally rented The Red Balloon and White Mane) and the cocktail for my affliction was complete.
“Write what you saw and how it makes you feel.” This was Mrs. McGinniss’s gentle prompt and so, I wrote about the cockfight my uncle took me to in Manila and read it out loud to my second-grade classmates whose parents, like mine, were diplomats and executives at global corporations. I held the paper up to my face so I wouldn’t see theirs and as I got lost in the words I had written, I felt this relief as the world stopped spinning and I transported myself back in time.
I shared the excitement of walking through crowds of men towards the wall of shouting voices around the ring. My uncle held my hand tightly, his feathered prize fighter under his arm. Surprised looks on brown faces as they saw only my white heritage. The smell of sweat, sewage, sweet fried plantains. The blur of feathers, glint of steel, splash of blood, the horror of seeing life drain out onto a dirt floor. The salty taste of tears in my mouth at dinner as I cried while eating the bird my uncle won.
Ok, sure, I wasn’t that detailed yet. It was probably more like: “I went to a chicken fight. It was loud. It was hot. Our rooster won. We ate chicken. I was sad for the chicken.” Still, when Robert Ozepovich screamed “You ate it??” I knew I’d found my calling, ADD be damned.
That moment lives on much more significantly today in my mind than it ever did when it actually happened. I know it’s annoying whenever you ask someone how they do something and the version of the answer that sounds too easy is: describe it and how it makes you feel. I guess the complicated version of that is: Go live life. Be uncomfortable. See its beauty. Collect some trauma. Survive it. Describe it and how it makes you feel.