Ambiguous. Extraordinary. Lovely. Nervous. Wild.

Marled by RYC blouse (c/o) (similar)
Wilfred dress (similar)
Boutique Nadine necklace (similar)
Linjer ring (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitoba

Ambiguous. Extraordinary. Lovely. Nervous. Wild. A teacher in twelfth grade asked us to make a list of five adjectives to describe ourselves and that was my list. (I don’t envy my former teachers. I don’t know what I would have done with me.) It was in twelfth grade that I started painting. I was desperate to create something, anything really, to express my lived experience in that moment in time. When I look back on it, I suspect it was because I’d come to recognise, suddenly and with startling clarity, just how limited my range of experience actually was. I’d found a void, and I wanted to fill it with acrylics and canvas.

Seventeen was an age that I subconsciously longed for. I’d started reading Seventeen magazine at age nine, and part of me believed that when I reached that age, I would feel like I’d arrived. I would be somehow whole, a complete person who knew who she was and what she wanted. When I arrived at age seventeen, however, reality proved to be quite different. I was still in high school, a place I desperately wanted to escape, not fully grown enough to be allowed to live in the adult world but too old to be impressed by anything in my familiar environment. I really did feel ambiguous at that age, neither here nor there, this nor that.

Part of me wanted to own that experience – enough of me that I willingly chose the word as the first of five adjectives to describe myself. But part of me wished to be just like everyone else who described themselves as nice and fun. And so when I read my list of adjectives aloud, it was with a pang of regret, because I would never be, “just like everyone else.” I had enough insight to know that I wouldn’t want to be. But I also knew that if I were just like everyone else, just like the people for whom words like nice and fun and funny sounded descriptive, I would never know the difference.

Years ago, I described my seventeen-year-old self as, “insecure and impulsive, suggestible and incredibly naive.” That description still rings true. But it misses one important point: I always knew that there was so much I didn’t know and I desperately wanted to learn.

There is something about 2020 that reminds me of that year. (The SARS epidemic happened when I was in twelfth grade, although I was only dimly aware of the panic and certainly never stopped to consider it could impact my life. I know, in hindsight, how lucky I was that it didn’t.) I think it’s the feeling it’s the feeling of being ambiguous – being neither here nor there, being alive without really living. My range of experiences, vast just a few months ago, is now startlingly limited. I’ve found a void, and I’m filling it in the best way that I know how – with acrylics and canvas.

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