Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Photography and Photo Art
Back before Christmas, I ordered a new hoodie from the Human Rights Campaign. It has a simple rainbow equality graphic on the front, a simplicity that I find appealing. I woke up to a cooler morning than we’ve had lately and decided to wear the hoodie on my morning walk with Mimi. I also decided to take a few selfies in the bathroom mirror before we left the house. I knew I wanted to post a new essay here and thought the shots might inspire me to add something to my self-portrait series.
I ran across an article not too long ago that talked about people who are happier living alone. These are not people who hate other people. They have close friendships. They even have intimate, sometimes romantic, relationships. But at the end of the day, they prefer to go home to their own little corner of the world, to embrace solitude. I am one of those people.
My original concept for this self-portrait was more of a hippy-dippy-let-your-inner-child-free-to-romp thing. Then this last week happened. More young black men gunned down by police for no apparent reason, police officers falling victim to sniper fire in Dallas, the ongoing BLM protests amid hyperbolic and untrue rhetoric about their “violent” motives, the over-aggressive police reaction to protesters across the country. And I haven’t even touched on other news. With all this going on, I wasn’t even sure if I had a voice anymore or, if I did, what I wanted to say. Then last night I was thinking about an article I’d read that compared what is happening in our country today to what was happening in 1968. I decided to go ahead and do this self-portrait with less of a staged costume effect and with a different focus in the narrative.
When I was child, I remember having a great deal of freedom. I don’t mean that just in the sense of being able to spend a lot of time reading or wandering through the woods across the road from our house. I also mean it in the sense that being a girl was only one minor aspect of my existence and experience rather than being the thing that defined me as an individual.
When I was talking with my sister about this self-portrait series and what I hoped to accomplish with it, she jokingly suggested that I pose nude. Um, no. Nude was out of the question but it got me thinking. One of my primary goals with this project is to explore aspects of myself that I have not completely revealed in the past or that make me feel uncomfortable. So I thought maybe I should push myself a bit and pose in a way that, for me, is more scantily clad because I’ve always had a poor body image. I knew I’d have to psych myself up for it.
In my post yesterday, I mentioned that I’ve been experiencing a bit of a writer’s block lately. So this morning I decided to start a new project as a way of unclogging the creative pathways. A week or so ago, I came up with the idea of doing a series of self-portraits with something written to go along with each one. The goal was (and is) to give tangible form to parts of myself that tend to remain at least partly veiled. My queer self, for example, is given free expression within the fictional and poetic realms but not so much outside of those. My masculine and feminine selves are often at least somewhat obscured by a layer of what is socially expected. And so on. By creating the self-portraits, I hope to push myself beyond those boundaries.
Karen Lee Kleis 