My Brave

Anyone who’s met me as an adult will have a difficult time believing this but, I was a quiet child. It took me quite a while to find my voice. Once I finally did, all bets were off. Until that time I sought solace in the world of creativity.

Some of my earliest memories are of playing with the boy next door. It began in toddlerhood when we routinely engaged in imaginary play and it continued throughout childhood until the precipice of adolescence. We collaborated and built incredible feats of architecture using the simple medium of wooden blocks. We dreamt up and played out scenes involving King Kong and Godzilla from the swing sets of our backyards. We played in the woods across the street from our homes and conjured up all sorts of grand expeditions.

These improvisational experiences encouraged me to put pen to paper and become a young playwright at the tender age of ten. I wrote a trilogy of comedic one act plays staged live from my family basement. This was only a brief stint as a young playwright as I quickly moved onto other creative pursuits. We hosted at home fashion shows and captured it in photography. Well ahead of our time, my friend and I put that same boy next door in a dress complete with makeup. We were free to explore and create and found joy in it.

I also remember sitting for hours on end at the kitchen table drawing. My most favorite thing to depict was the comics from the Sunday newspaper. I would sit there replicating the characters from the comic strips. Charlie Brown, Beetle Bailey, Family Circus … looking intently at the comics …  then drawing on my paper … looking back at the comics again, studying … then turning back to the paper … making my hand draw the contour lines of what information had been taken in by my eyes. My ability to draw and capture recognizable characters left me with a feeling of satisfaction.

I started taking tap when I was 4 years old at Miss Terri’s School of Dance. She ran the classes out of a studio in her pink house on suburban Long Island. While I grew to love tap it took me a while to feel comfortable in class. I would spend part of each dance class lost in my own headspace. I typically spent a portion of each class staring out the sliding glass door into Miss Teri’s backyard. I was transfixed by her pet German Shepherd and wondered what he was thinking as he looked back at us in dance class.

I was no novice daydreamer, I was at an expert level. I could disappear into my head and completely forget I was in a room full of people. Frequently, while on line waiting for my turn to demonstrate drills across the floor, I’d be lost rapt in my own imagination. Someone could repeatedly call my name and I would not respond because I did not hear them. On about the third or fourth time they’d repeated my name it would suddenly register. When I got older my Aunt Paula told me the dance teacher often got my attention by yelling “where are your feet, Eileen, where are your feet!?!” I suppose that was the impetus to shake from my dream-like state and realize, “oh, it must be my turn to go now.”

Even though I spaced out during part of each tap class it didn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention altogether. I knew all the steps to each dance routine. I easily committed to memory the rhythm of the dance steps syncopated to the music. Over time I fell more in love with tap and stopped escaping to my inner world, wondering about that dog, and started engaging in class more with others. What I learned to love about tap was that I could hear, from the sound of my footwork, when I was out of sync with the music. Once I was aware I could figure out my missteps and correct them.

Over the years I added Jazz and Ballet to my repertoire as well. Throughout my childhood and adolescence those end of season dance recitals were the highlights of our year. The preparation and anticipation to dance before a live audience was a heightened experience for a young suburban girl. My sisters, friends, and I were always so anxious and excited. It was only the local high school auditorium, but to us it felt like we were performing on Broadway. After each recital we’d receive bouquets and go to Friendly’s. We’d often see other families with young girls in costumes there too.

Toward the end of fourth grade I was invited, along with a few of my peers, to take an intelligence test by the school. The outcome of which resulted in me entering 5th grade as a student in the gifted and talented program during the early days of that practice. Mornings were spent in our traditional classroom with the typical curriculum. Afternoons were spent in the rigors of advanced level classes in social studies, mathematics, and creative writing.

In social studies we were charged with selecting and summarizing three articles from The New York Times. That was a bit difficult for an 11 year old, but doable. A challenge, but it was within my grasp. The bane of my existence, however, was math class.  We had to complete mathematical equations at a high school level, completely skipping over the fact we hadn’t yet been taught math at a junior high school level. Math is especially sequential, knowledge and skills build on one another. I now struggled in math where I had previously been proficient.

Those long afternoons were worth it though, as each day ended in creative writing class where my heart, spirit, and imagination could sing! We regularly read poetry and created our own original works. I envisioned what life would be like if my ballet slipper could talk and then had the opportunity to write about it. I chronicled the travails of my stuffed pink elephant trapped in a toy box. Occasionally, we were assigned with including an illustration along with our writing; a bonus! In writing I could breathe life into my daydreams.

It isn’t lost on me that I was kind of a quirky kid. I was aware of it as a child. I was self-conscious about it. It made me feel awkward and like I wouldn’t fit in. When presented with an unfamiliar situation my shyness would assert itself in full force. My natural inclination was to withdraw and get quiet. I escaped to my interior world to find comfort in uncomfortable situations. I only really felt free to express myself within the constructs of my house, my family, and my friends in my neighborhood. They were my refuge from the outside world that, quite frankly, scared me a little.

That shy girl still rides shotgun with me, but fortunately, that fear subsided as I grew older. No doubt it was largely fueled by the self-confidence and skills I cultivated in art, dance, and writing. The arts taught me to be brave enough to be myself in all spaces. And I’m still leaning into that all these many years later. Creative expression was, and is, my refuge.