Originality
I’m slicing radishes with a small knife on a wooden board when I see it. The wide wrinkled knuckles and the way my little finger lifts slightly to the side, out of the way. Not my hands, but my mother’s. I am startled by the resemblance. How much more of heris here? And how much of me, is just me?
Our stories are unique and our histories are personal. Each one of us moving through life in intentional and unintentional ways, sometimes on paths we can’t even see. And we have DNA from our ancestors, physical traits and mannerisms passed to us unconditionally. Yet we follow our own lines through life, building on our experiences and living our lessons.
I have been affected and influenced by others, made choices that I have regretted and others that I have happily announced. We all try some things and avoid other things.
No one else is me, not my mother though we certainly share traits. I have never shared her love of black and white Westerns. She has never had my love of music and dancing. She never learned to ride a motorcycle and I will never know the depths of motherhood. But our hands are the same.
Am I the only one with dancer dreams that crashed too soon or the only one who typed their heartbreak into Diaryland or LiveJournal in the 2000s? The only one to lose a job I loved or to grieve my father? Certainly not. My experiences are not just mine but how I got here is just for me.
Our beautiful originality is in our path, our choices and our responses to the world around us. We become unusual. We might feel wonderful in our individualism, our differences, our uniqueness. We might revel in our personal style or the wildness we find inside ourselves that our friends find alien and others mock.
Sometimes we feel like we are the only one with these pains, with these dreams, with these memories.
A long time ago, a colleague of mine found a Fisher-Price dog toy and brought it into the office. It made a sort of jiggly, squeaky noise as you pulled it along and the tail was a tight spring with a bead on the end. If you were a young child in the late 60s or 70s you might have had one of these “snoopy” dogs dragging behind you.
Everyone in the room was alive with bright memories of the pull along dog. We told stories of the names given, tail beads that were found in odd places and persistent squawky wheels that only the children loved. As a group of office workers we had almost nothing in common and yet here we were circled around the toy dog on the floor, laughing and cooing over a shared memory.
I am a human that needs food, water, light, shelter and connection with others. That connection can be found when I share the things that feel like they belong only to me and find that they are a part of others too.
These oddities and quirks, the parts that we collect along the way that feel so personal, are our way to gather together. Each of us bringing our tides of joy and pain and sharing our falls and our wins. How we survive this life is a crucial part of our stories. Can the thing that hurt me, that separated me, connect me?
It’s vulnerable to share these parts of ourselves, we have been teased and criticised enough. I hide this blog from the people I know. I’m not ashamed exactly, just tired of being misunderstood. But I think I am supposed to share personal things here, to be vulnerable, to be relatable. Or something. Sometimes I feel like I’m wrapping up the acceptable parts in a neat little bundle ready to ship out in matching packaging.
But writers are being their wonderful, human selves, publicly, with the wind in their hair, dirt under their fingernails and their scars showing. Just taking a leap with words and a bit of bravery in their pockets. And I read it, connect with it and love it. I might discover a new idea, a new path, a different view. I might feel the high of someone’s success, remember a heartache or just feel content because I’m not the only one sipping tea in a culture fuelled by coffee.
Being original is wondrous and we don’t have to agree on everything or share an unusual interest for me to enjoy your writing. We are all weird and also for some, not weird at all. Our hobbies, our collections, our strange obsessions and secret burdens are all a part of that and I want to read about it. More please. Maybe I feel it too.
Sometimes it is our sameness that brings us together, while holding our warm mugs and gathering at the shore or in the comments section as we listen to each other’s stories and share our humanity.
This article was originally published on Substack