I have been collaging the past couple of months (duh, Coved) with Mel Toth, a woman who has been deeply interested involved in a process called Soul Collage for years. What we do together is not that, but it’s also not not Soul Collage. Know what I mean?

Anyway, I got so excited about our Sunday play times—Mel leads us in collage, and then I take over and we transition to writing—that I asked Mel to share it with me. We did class twice this Sunday—once for the year-long writing group Mel is part of that I’ve been leading since January and once as part of an Eventbrite group we invented.  

I was so shocked by what happened in the first group that I created a secretive second collage for the second group (it was a picture that covered four other pictures so you only saw the one unless I lifted the top picture to show you). I was feeling exposed and didn’t want to have to write about any of it until I was ready.

Here’s what happened: part of the collage experience is going through magazines and finding images that engage you for some reason (either positively or negatively). I did then and had my pictures: the open road, empty theater seats, an empty, nicely-lit home office, a man on what looks like a sinking boat in choppy water. I cut out a little picture of a woman who looked like my writing partner and I had had an adult baby, and then I saw a photo of a man’s belted waist, jeans, tool belt, hammer, tanned and veined hand. 

I started to turn the page. I had a hole in my collage, but he didn’t fit with the rest of the images. I had a guy in my picture already, and he was a lone fisherman, perhaps, fighting the elements to survive. I didn’t need a Ken Doll, a Mr. Infinity I Got This.  

When I was in college and taking a creative writing class, at one point in the semester, the professor gave me his copy of The Story of O saying he thought I might like it. I was so shy. I was tall and loud, perhaps, but I was a sexual snail. I opened the book and read some pages and felt dirty and embarrassed. My sweet professor thought I was a pervert! (I swear up and down this man was innocent—he was dealing with a hormonal and sexually repressed young woman who was writing “bodice rippers”, and he was doing his best to meet me where I was, I think.) I returned the book to him and told him I was going to head more towards Huck Finn in the future.

But there’s the thing: 

He saw me. i just wasn’t ready to be seen because I hadn’t even seen myself.

He knew better than I did what it meant that I loved the movie Nine and a Half Weeks. I mean loved it. Not the part where Mickey Roarke’s character gets stupid; the part where Kim Basinger’s character is coming alive because she bumped into a man who turned her own. I love the scenes where she looks at art, looks at food, touches her won face because they are hot. Suddenly the world is ripe, gorgeous, smoky in that Flashdance kind of way! 

One time years ago, I went to the doctor to get tested for STDs, and when he called to say my results were negative, he asked what I wanted him to do with the paperwork. I told him to write Miracles Happen on it and frame it in his office. This is to tell you that I liked being touched, touching. If you’ve read my book, you’ll know that it wasn’t all because I was full of healthy self-esteem or longing. 

 What I did was called fucking. It wasn’t until years and years and years later than I learned there was something else.

Anyway. Now I have healthy self-esteem and no longer have this incredible pull to merge with other people in the mistaken belief that perhaps they’d magically morph into my missing mother. Now I spend most of my time alone. 

I like it. Sometimes I get lonely—this is about COVID and distancing on top of everything else, after all, but most of all I feel settled, at home with myself.

And yet.

I cut out the picture of the male hand, the tool belt, the belted waist, and I put it on my collage.

I had us, for part of the writing exercise, pick the image that most asked for our attention. I started to write about the man at sea, about how strong I am, how capable, how fearless. All the old stuff I’ve been saying for a while. You got this. The seas may be rough, but you’ll be okay. And then I looked at the photo of the man with the tool belt and I realized I wasn’t really being honest. I didn’t want to face some storm alone.

I wanted to be held. I wanted to be challenged to live with an open heart.

The reason I wrote a personal ad was to hold myself accountable. If I want something, I need to go for it. I’ve noticed as I spend more and more of my life writing that the more honest I am—the more willing I am to feel my feelings and claim my desires and needs—the more incredible things happen. I extend my hand and my hand itself turns to gold.

There I was thinkingI was just offering a grape or asking for a piece of paper, instead the world is being delivered to me, in me, through me. I see this in the people I work with: the more honest they are, the more their voices are edges with wonder because their baskets are suddenly overflowing with grace.

If you are willing to feel the hard stuff, I am seeing, the more likely it is that you’ll get to bathe in joy somewhere down the line. 

 It’s so much easier to say I’m done with romantic relationships. I can spend the rest of my life solo, delighted, but I also have the sense that a life best lived isn’t one focused on what is easier. On my deathbed, I would rather look into the eyes of my beloved than to wonder what it would have been like if I’d ever been able to love fully, without Plan B tucked firmly in my pocket.

I’m so grateful I met Mel. Her sister Julie connected us, and adoption connected Julie and me. 

I am grateful for all that I have. 

I am so grateful you are here with me. It’s what makes it all so wonderful. 

Thank you.

 If you are interested in our class, here’s the link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-art-of-collage-and-memoirish-writing-tickets-112247063990?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch