What is Remembered - Lives

Creativity in turbulent times.

Photo by wenbin sia on Unsplash

I keep thinking about how right now - at this moment in time - there is so much happening, and then I step back and zoom all the way out - I see that something has always been happening at some point somewhere. Storytellers and artists are at the forefront of it all, always. We have this ability to take what’s going on and show & tell about it. Which feels a little bit like having a super power. To see the things and name the things. I talk about that a lot - the naming of things.

Words matter, how we frame everything matters.

I sat down at my fading keyboard to originally write about creativity, but that somehow feels too small. Everything I’m doing right this moment feels so small, but I persist.

My husband and I were discussing what it means to speak out, and he asked me a question I couldn’t definitively answer - what good does it do to keep speaking out when there are no actions behind it? I tried to clumsily say that speaking out can lead to action, it can inspire others to act when they may not have otherwise. I don’t know if I’m right about that, and so his question remains an echo in my mind.

I see this statement often - “if you’ve ever asked yourself what you would have done “back then” (when fascism arrived), you’re doing it now, whatever you would have done then, you’re doing it now.” I think about my grandmother, who was in nursing school in 1938, she hid her Jewish identity. She changed her name, tore her own photo out of her yearbook, and denounced Judaism. At the height of WWII, she went to work in one of New York’s most famous mental institutions (as my uncle tells it). She hid in her work. I didn’t know about this part of her life until 2020, she’s been gone since 1994. She hid her history from me.

I know why she hid. The fear. She feared so much that it eventually ate her. I believe her fear in life devoured her, and she tried to mask it using alcohol with a side of cold detachment.

I don’t want that legacy.

I want my story, my legacy, to be more than what I didn’t do.

I was taught to fight, to stand up, to use whatever tools I have.

My mom used to love to tell me a cautionary tale about not trusting women - how she’d been betrayed by so many, how she’d stood her ground one day when a group of girls tried to fight her and because she stood up to them they backed down. I didn’t take from her stories that I should be afraid, I took from her that I should stand for what is right and that I should be cautious about who to trust. I keep my inner circles small, but I also have a large circle that extends to anyone who wishes no harm. And I will fight to protect that.

I lead my life with love at the forefront. I don’t know any other way to be. I can love you and never know your name, because you are a human who deserves it. I wish more people felt the same. I wish more people remembered what keeps them alive.

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For the first time in a long time, I thought about the shape of my memoir, and not just about the words on the page. I feel excited again. The little nudge and tickle that happens when an idea comes to play, it’s not a new idea, but one I keep returning to over and over again like my favorite comfort show. You know the one - you know it by heart, it still excites you, and you want to return to it in comfortable familiarity when everything else feels distant. My story keeps returning to me in that way.

And I’m reminded that what is remembered - lives.

For the last few weeks the strangest things keep happening, little Déjà vu moments, and synchronicities. Magic in the messy middles. Maybe nudges and nods to follow what I already know. I forget sometimes that serendipity is my superpower.

Even in the midst of all this chaos, with creativity is still where I long to be. Cheering on the artists who are putting their art out into the world. Remembering that beauty, poetry, books, paintings, drawings, music - all of it is what matters in the end, what binds us to one another. Fighting for the right to exist in a world that wants to pretend that the only things that matter are that which someone with the loudest voice says does. But it’s not true.

My words are my creative form of resistance. Writing about this life is my act of defiance. Creating is one of the highest forms of dissent. And so that’s what I’ll keep doing. I’ll keep remembering what it means to be human, I’ll keep writing my words down and shaping and reshaping my story over and over - until it lives.

May you all remember and find what lives in you too.