The Door
Celebrating one year since The Dress
Spooky greetings my friends.
I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since I first published The Dress for you all, my lovely readers. Thank you to all of you who read my work, share my poems and come and see my shows. It’s been fun hasn’t it?
The Dress changed my life for the better and brought so many gifts into my world.
This evening, I’m sending you a story about how I turned my life around after finding my world at a standstill. It’s the story of how I wrote The Dress - so it’s a tale about a tale.
You can consider this your bedtime story.
This is: The Door.
Sound on!
The Door
They say at this time of year the veil between this world and the next is thin.
It’s always around this time of year that I write more poetry. In summer I make art, in autumn I write poems about love, in winter I read other people’s work and let ideas gestate. And in spring I set my poems free and put them into the world.
Autumn is the season for poetry. Poems drop like leaves fall from the trees. I gather them. I write and write, as though the doors of creativity have been flung wide open within me, and my mind becomes a highway for new stories and ideas to be shipped into this old world from whichever realm new ideas come from. Precious cargo.
I am obsessed with doors.
This time last year I wrote, painted, recorded and published The Dress. If you’re new to this newsletter, here’s the link to the story and painting that changed my life. The Dress is the tale of a designer gown I found at a modest price in a second-hand shop which I failed to buy. It’s a tale of living with missed opportunities, accepting life’s limitations and knowing when to accept gifts from the gods. The painting that accompanies this story is a two-metre self-portrait that I created in my bedroom. It’s pictured here.
When I wrote The Dress I had pretty much decided to give up writing. I had spent well over a decade trying to make a living as a writer. Though I’d had some success, writing hadn’t taken me where I wanted to go. Not at all. I’d spent a lot of time writing about things I thought I should write about, instead of the things I truly wanted to write about. I’d also recovered from well-over a decade of crippling mental health challenges and I’d written a collection of poems about it which I could not, for love nor money, get published in the traditional way that I thought I wanted. Standing at the edge of my thirties, I found myself healthy and strong but far, far behind my peers. It felt as though everybody was getting promotions, or married or buying houses and here I was with a small unpublished book of poems, a head full of ideas, and an untold story.
And an audacious black cat, of course.
I had no choice, but to start my life from scratch. Except that this time, I was going to do it the way I wanted to.
A few days before I wrote The Dress, I was working in a co-working space in Oslo, where I was setting up my business that autumn. Having mostly given up on writing, I’d started painting that summer instead, for the first time in fifteen years. All of a sudden, I began to see the world through the eyes of an artist. My life became brighter, the movement of the trees spoke to me in a language I understood, and best of all my heart began to whisper to my head. This is what making art does, it unlocks the intelligence of the body, of the heart.
As a writer, I’d had more than a door or two slammed in my face. I’ve never known heartbreak like having a manuscript rejected over and over by an agent, editor or publisher. But as an artist, I didn’t care what people thought or what accolades I was awarded. I did not care which institutions decided that I was the artist of the moment. I just wanted to paint because it made me feel alive.
I just wanted to make things beautiful. I wanted to show people how beautiful I felt inside now that I was better, and how beautiful other people look to me when I meet them. I wanted to show the world how beautiful the pain of living had made me. As I painted and painted throughout the summer of 2022, something in me grew a little braver, a little stronger. I painted self-portraits because I wanted to see who I was. I think that’s what most of us want: to be seen. To see ourselves a little more clearly.
So there I am sitting with a broken heart, having all but given up on my dream of writing something I am proud of. To my left, I see an open door to a small room, newly kitted out with podcast recording equipment. My heart whispers, it whispers to me “there’s an open door.”
I had fought with the Gods about my flopped poetry manuscript for well over a year by then. I’d walk around town and silently beg them please just to open to the door, just one door. All I wanted to do was to share my poetry with the world. I’m not ashamed to say I cried about it. I think crying is a wonderful expression of emotion and we should do it as often as we need to.
I’d managed to come through other trials and tribulations, but the poetry rejections had been the final straw. When I think back to the image of the open door at the shared office space, I like to remember that it swung open by itself, with a creek and comical, ghostly “woooooo”. But it didn’t. It didn’t happen like that. But imagine if it had.
That weekend, The Dress happened. I wrote that short story and by the end of the fortnight, I’d painted an image of myself dressed up in an imaginary gown made up of black mascara tears. One day I hope I will make that dress for real. I want to make that dress of tears. I want to wear it.
I was seized by a moment of creativity, as though something in me had grown tired of knocking and decided to kick down a door, rather than politely waiting. Though I was largely unbothered by what others thought, I wanted to show myself what I could do and I locked myself away in my bedroom to paint The Dress. I could only afford building paper from the DIY shop and a packet of dry pastels. I spent my final pennies on the green pastel that forms the outer layer of the background. I made it all at the foot of my bed where I had a couple of spare meters squared. Finally, I managed to make something I was proud of, out of whatever I could get my hands on. I still make art from building paper.
I like to name my heart’s desires out loud. And back then I can tell you that I wanted to tell that story. I wanted to paint that story. I wanted to tell the world about that stupid Sonia Rykiel dress I never bought. It was absurd. Absurd that this was the story I wanted to tell. Of all the things I’ve overcome in my life, this was what I wanted to broadcast to the world. This?
But the door had been left open to the podcast room. And I decided to walk through and record that short story. In not just writing but recording The Dress, I began to hear my own voice more clearly. In painting it, I began to see myself for who I really was. I want so badly to witness myself. To watch myself when I am at my best, and even better: to watch myself when I am at my worst. When I am jealous, or ashamed, or hurt, or hurting someone else. To bear witness to it all – that is why I write. That is why I make art. To see.
People loved that story. People got in touch to tell me about their own “black dress moments.” Folks tell me now they never risk not buying a special find that they’ve spotted in a thrift or vintage store. I opened the door for myself first and then people started to open doors for me too. In the year since I first published The Dress, people have begun to give me opportunities that I never even dared to dream of. If I’d have published my poems as a book, I’d have had nothing else to learn about what I was capable of creating. In my grief, I learned to make art and my poems found their rightful home upon a stage and in these newsletters.
I consider The Dress to be the beginning of my life, in a way. Up until that moment, I felt like I was just sat on the pavement at the side of the world, watching it all pass me by and wondering when it would all be over. Now I feel as though I am inside of my life. I feel as though I can make things, and meet people, and truly, truly experience the fullest depths of what it means to live.
If I have learned anything from my first year alive it is this: that whatever I wanted from others I must give to myself first. I had to love myself before I could accept love. I had to see myself for who I truly was before I could let others see me. Above all, I had to learn to accept the doors that were closed for me, before I could see which ones were open. That is why I write in the poem Thelma’s Waltz that “I love a door when it’s open, and I love a door more when it’s closed.”
In this way, I find treasure in the wreckage of my loss. When I cannot afford something new and sparkly to wear, I make it. This year, I started to upcycle old clothes and cover them in text from my poetry instead. It’s not Sonia Rykiel. It’s me, armed with an old t shirt and a fabric marker. But it is enough. I still walk past shop windows in the fancy parts of town and stop and stare at something that I cannot have. Sometimes it makes me sad and then I remember The Dress, and remind myself that the best of me is yet to come. That whatever it is I am looking for, I won’t find it in a shop window.
Dreams do come true. Doors do swing open. But never in the way you think they’re going to, or at the time that you think that they’re supposed to. And those dreams are never as shiny as they seem when they are in your head. No. Dreams become reality and often they make you feel scared and uncomfortable because you have to grow big enough to take them into your body and into your life.
Once you walk through your door, there is no going back. This path is unlit. I do not know where this road leads, but I know it is the one for me. It is enough.