I'm Brave, But I'm Chickenshit

The woman in the photos existed long before I had a name for her

There is a wrong kind of paint to use on your body.

I found this out the hard way in a Portland apartment with a tripod set up in my living room, music playing, and a very specific vision in my head that I was determined to bring into existence. The wrong kind, as it turns out, will stain your skin a sickly shade of blue for days after you wash it off. I know this because I was blue for days. And I would do it again.

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But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I went to art school in Seattle at eighteen. Photography had been part of my life since I was sixteen and I loved it —I was given an old Canon AT-1 fully manual camera and it was my love, but forcing yourself to be creative as part of a machine has never worked for me. Being creative on demand sucks all the joy out of it, all the life out of it, all the emotion out of it. It feels like checking boxes and fulfilling tasks. So I quit.

I moved back home. Became a scuba instructor because I had an opportunity to go from basic open water diver to certified instructor in six months if I dove pretty much every day, which I did, and became one of the youngest female scuba instructors at the time. When that stopped paying I got what people called a “real job” and became a medical assistant. I found myself dating someone who was all kinds of wrong for me, in a town I had outgrown, and I knew I couldn’t stay. That town would suffocate me.

I had been different growing up. Bullied for it. And I needed the freedom to be more of that, not less. More weird. More color. More me. I had tasted that freedom in Seattle and I wasn’t willing to give it up permanently.

So when the opportunity came to move to Portland with a couple of good friends, I took it.

Portland was where I met him. The new boyfriend. The one with the earworm.

He had certain expectations. One of them was that I needed a degree, because apparently a trade certificate was not good enough. Not for him. And I let that get in. That little voice that says you’ll be enough when, you’ll be enough if. I let it do something to my sense of worth and I thought, well, maybe I’ll take some classes at the community college. See what comes of it. Start with things I enjoy.

I signed up for math, which was miserable. Sociology, which was fascinating. And two black-and-white film photography classes, because black-and-white film is my first photography love. It is all I shot in college. I love being in the darkroom. I love the graininess of it, the texture of it, the way your mind has to make up a story about what was happening, what colors things actually were. Black-and-white forces you to see in shades. To sit with ambiguity. To wonder. I have always loved that about it.

The instructor was remarkable. Talented and generous with creative freedom in a way that art school never had been. She gave us projects with real room to move inside them and I thought: I want to do something that feels edgy. Not edgy for the world. Edgy for me.

Getting naked and taking self portraits was both exciting and terrifying. Selfies were still a good ten years away. Being in front of the camera at all felt foreign to me. I was much more comfortable behind it. And being naked in front of it felt genuinely taboo.

Which is exactly why I did it.

I painted myself blue. Set up the tripod. Put on music and danced and shot and tried to freeze at the right moments, the light being what it was, which is one of the gifts of black-and-white: you can use almost any light and it works in ways color never would.

I took the negatives into the photo lab and thought: these are cool. But what if.

What if I sandwiched two negatives together in the film carrier and exposed light through both of them onto the paper at once. Two images layered. One print. Something that had never existed before and could not be exactly duplicated because it was made by hand, by me, in a darkroom, from film I shot in my own living room painted blue and dancing.

When I saw what came out of that process I felt something I had been chasing for a long time without knowing I was chasing it. Like I had finally gotten something from the inside all the way to the outside. Like the thing I was trying to express had actually made it through.

I brought them home and showed him because I was so excited I couldn’t contain it.

He looked at them and said: you’re not showing those in class.

I said: what?!

He said: you’re naked in them. You’re not going to show those in front of other people.

I said: they’re art. First of all. And second of all, yes I am. My body. My choice. I decide.

It became a huge point of contention. Days of fighting. The kind of fighting that wears you down if you let it.

I showed them anyway.

I stood in that classroom and I showed the images I had made of myself, painted blue, layered and sandwiched and printed by hand, and it was vulnerable and scary and so alive. It wasn’t shock value. It was expression. It was something that was mine, fully mine, made from the inside out. And I felt it in my whole body, the particular aliveness of doing the thing you were told not to do because it is true and it is yours and no one gets a vote.

And then time went on.

The earworms got deeper. I covered more and more of that part of myself up. The color. The weird. The funky. The woman who painted herself blue and danced in her living room and printed double exposures by hand and showed them in class anyway.

I covered her up so slowly I didn’t even notice it happening.

Until one day I was standing in a closet full of jeans and sweatshirts thinking: this is not who I have ever been. Where did the color go. Where did the weird and funky go.

Until one day I was sitting in a Starbucks parking lot crying into a chai I didn’t know how to drink alone anymore, unable to answer the simplest question a person can ask themselves.

What do I want right now?

I tell you this story because the woman in those photos never left.

She went quiet for a while. She got covered up. She got talked out of things and worn down by earworms and ground down by years of trying to fit containers that were never built for her. But she did not leave. She was always here, waiting for me to stop performing long enough to remember her.

The heretical heart is not something I built. It is something I uncovered. It was there in the Portland apartment with the wrong kind of blue paint that stained me for days and I would do it again. It was there in the darkroom sandwiching negatives together to make something that had never existed. It was there when I said my body, my choice, and showed them anyway.

It has always been there.

And if you are reading this, I suspect yours has been there too. Covered up. Gone quiet. Talked out of things and worn down. Sitting in its own version of a parking lot wondering where the color went.

It did not leave either.

That is what we are here to find.

And because I like to put a soundtrack to my chart and to life… Hand in My Pocket by Alanis Morissette