Mending My Gallery
and being seen
Nothing I could write would do better justice than a quote from James Baldwin.
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.
I think one of the greatest acts of love anyone can offer is to witness someone.
It may not be profound, but when you’ve lived most of your life expecting judgment as the first response when you enter a space, to be witnessed, fully, is a rebellion in itself.
I’ve spent so long focused on circumventing that judgment. In what I produce artistically, how I look physically, even how I move throughout my spaces.
Each moment is a chance for me to take control over what I had unconsciously assumed preceded love and connection.
For me – judgment came tied with love.
So it became a ritual to bend and fit myself into others’ puzzles to try and skip over judgment to get to that idea of love.
I became skilled in breaking off parts of myself and hiding them away to fit into others’ worlds without ever asking myself if it was a part that made me, me.
I think that’s why I was so disconnected from my art for so long. When I’d finished a painting, I immediately wanted to discard it. There was almost a shame to the final piece. I could see all the ways in which I let my art be persuaded by the judgment that was sure to come. I could see the gaps in the piece where I had shoved parts into boxes, scattering them on the floor, just to control how others may perceive it.
It was easier to suffocate my art – and myself.
Over the years, I’ve had many names.
My grandmother called me Zsa Zsa, my other calls me Talula, my family calls me DeeDee, friends call me D. Even D-rex if you somehow know me from softball. I went by Tally for my artworks and have a slew of people who only know me by that.
I was never Deanna — always transforming into someone else, that it never truly felt like I could hold my own name. That it was for others to mold as they pleased.
I wish it began and ended with my name. But it took very little for all of myself to become just as malleable.
Someone asked me recently what I prefer to be called. I waved it off and said “whatever you want,” expecting most people to eventually refer to me as D, the easier choice. He stopped me and said “no, but really, what do you want to be called?”
My little self wanted to scream “DEANNA, CALL ME DEANNA,” but again I said “it doesn’t matter.”
Why the fuck doesn’t it matter?
To me, D has always felt lazy. It’s the type of name you shout at someone in a shitty bar with beer soaked counters because the person keeps asking if it’s Siena, Breanna, Anne, so you give them a letter to move on from the conversation.
D is what you give people while playing volleyball because calling out three syllables while chasing after a ball just doesn’t cut it.
It’s what you give someone when you assume people want something simple.
Be as easy as possible — as digestible. Focus on what you offer, not what you need.
(For anyone reading this that calls me D already — shut up I love you)
An affirmation I’ve been telling myself in the mirror lately with about as much conviction as a dog wearing a cone is:
I’m worth the burden of knowing.
I know. powerful. profound. tantalizing even.
Telling someone my preferred name seems like the most simple task out there, but for me, it holds a weight I didn’t realize.
I even have a hard time telling someone my love language.
Like, I wouldn’t say gifts are my love language at all. BUT, gifts are pretty significant as I’ve been unlearning this attachment to be “easy.”
Every year, I expect a message from a certain family member around my birthday that says something like “well you’re hard to shop for and you didn’t tell me what to get, so I didn’t get anything.”
I’m 29 now, so I can handle someone not getting me a gift, nor do I expect one (so I say). But man, if I haven’t seen that messaging play out in how I connect with other people constantly.
It’s almost easier for me to see myself as “hard to know,” than to accept that someone refused to get to know me.
So now, if someone gives me a rock and says “this made me think of you,” I will start crying. In fact, I did start crying, when I got to Barcelona and my friend had the whole nightstand covered in rocks she found for me.
We went to Denver last week, where I took her to see a burlesque show featuring songs from Chicago and Cabaret, the musicals, both of which she had not seen, nor had she been to a burlesque show before. It really was a night of what I loved.
And after the show, she asked if we could watch Chicago. I sang along to the whole movie as one must and she thanked me for showing her something that meant so much to me. Half way through the movie, I had this weird “a-ha” moment where I thought “oh shit, I’m being fully perceived right now.”
That same friend told me recently she feels loved by me because I take the time to truly know her, and then she gave me a McDonald’s fry and told me that she hopes I let myself be seen as much as I see others.
May we all find a friend that offers a potato along with profound insight.
“But in a world turned upside down, things I thought were mine and mine alone can be taken away much more easily than I would have imagined. If my body were cut up in pieces and those pieces mixed with those of other bodies, and then if someone told me, “Find your left eye,” I suppose it would be difficult to do so.”
— Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police
The Memory Police is about an island where things disappear — it starts small like perfume, gemstones, stamps. Everyone on the island just forgets what the thing is, and collectively agrees to dispose of it, yet they all feel when something goes missing.
People will wake up and no longer have a job or no longer have something they truly loved. And they watch it float down the river into the sea, and slowly release the memory along with it. Until they can hold that very thing in their hands and it spark no joy, no idea, no feeling. It is gone.
The book asks us to think about how much we can lose before we are no longer ourselves, and how easily we accept that loss.
The name Deanna went so unused that it began to feel foreign to me. It was a name that I was ready to discard into the river, and only recently decided to fully revive.
I used to think Tally made me feel more like myself, but I could have 50 names and all of them would end up feeling the same because I operated with so much complacency about losing myself, much like the people of the island were to losing their memories.
I didn’t care what I was offering myself as long as I was able to offer something to everyone else.
Unmended Gallery
Your voice is filled with all that you love
I tell myself
As I leave my doors open wide
for anyone to enter
hang their art up on
my walls
white paint now hidden
yet the doors stay open
nailing their art
on top of another
the room now bloated
and splitting
My voice is all that I love
as I hold my own art near
unable to find
a place to hang my heart
I am filled with all that you love
the gallery says to me
as its walls begin to tearThe older I get the more I’ve realized, being seen is everything.
It is what I want for my art. What I want in friendship. It is all I ask of love — to witness and be witnessed.
When my best friend and I went on a photography trip, I noticed the urge to crawl back inside. I noticed the fear of being seen in her lens and what imperfections, reasons of unworthiness, she might find there. I had the urge to avoid judgment that may come forward by hiding myself and trying to find the angles to shrink to fit some idea of what I should be.
And I looked at the photos later as that familiar taste of judgment wanted to rise up in my throat, but I stayed in that space. I asked myself what it meant to for someone who loved me to fully see me.
So I asked her what her favorite photo was.
The one she chose was one I truthfully wish could be erased. At least that was my initial reaction. It was something I would call “unattractive,” and yet, this person who I adore, loved an image that I seemed to hate.
I looked at it for a long time and at first, I noticed the flaws. I homed in on the features that I would fix, the details that made me “unworthy.” Yet, the longer I sat with the image, I began to loosen my grip. People you love don’t try to judge first. They see your soul. They see you.
We can become so conditioned to view the world through that judging lens that we don’t realize the ones we are most harming are ourselves.
I’ve been lucky enough to find people that are teaching me — everyday and with a lot of resistance from myself — that I don’t need to be useful to be worthy. That to love me does not have to come with harsh judgements. And that I can let people see me without a pen.
I don’t need my name to know myself. We are all just galleries, filling our walls with the ideas, people, and things that we love. We all want to matter. And I’m learning that my meaning doesn’t have to be all tied up in my service or in what I produce.
I want to take care of my gallery.
And focus on what I want to love, not hiding parts in these boxes just to scatter.
If you gain nothing else from this note on identity, please listen to this song and imagine your own gallery.
How does it look? Is it filled with all that you love? Or what someone else loves? Is there a part of your gallery that’s off limits? Is there a part that you wish you tended to more?
I’m not saying you have to show your full self and nothing but your full self at all times. I think some parts of ourselves can be kept sacred and just for us. But, I am saying that I hope you can trust that you are worth knowing. fully.
And that you let your friends take pictures of you. Not the super staged, hot girl poses, but the real you. Let them show you why they love you.
Thanks for reading.
xx