Kid Stuff
Unearthing Emotional Memory from a Distant Past
A few weeks ago I stopped in to see my parents, check in on how they’re doing, etc. When I was leaving my mom hands me a big box full of stuff I did when I was a kid. Early Life Ephemera.
Within the box I unearthed mostly stuff from kindergarten through second grade, including daily journals, arts and crafts, composition books that detailed my journey to learn to read, old report cards, photos, and Mother’s Day cards of yore (hey, wait a sec, Ma, you were supposed to keep those!)
“It’s not mine to throw away.” my mom said, referring to the big box of stuff. So I took it home and over 2 nights went through it, tossed a few things and even scanned the more interesting stuff. And of the scans here’s a few tidbits of my old “work”.
It’s just funny, the perception of a child and how you remember childhood. I’ve been trying to find the words of how to explain what I’m feeling about unearthing all this old stuff so here’s what I got. You know, I feel like all working artists have a tap on their “childlike wonder and awe”. Indeed, that’s how ideas come and that’s how we get lost in the work, you gotta keep playing around and playing with ideas. You keep wondering about the world around you. So having never really left that realm and growing up into an adult I still retain vivid memories and experiences from childhood. I’ve never really separated from those experiences that I remember (to both my benefit AND detriment) and I’m aware of how certain things shaped my life.
Granted, I don’t remember everything from childhood, but I do remember how I perceived things. And of course, perception is relative, for instance, because at the time of doing all these pieces I really thought I was churning out some badass art. The emotional relevance is real as a child and that’s something I’ve carried into adulthood. Hopefully we all did. Back then, it felt like these art pieces are badass.
When I unearthed my second grade class picture, I hardly recognized my peers. In my memory they look so much different, we weren’t those little kids in the picture. My emotional memory tells me these were my equals and how we interacted felt just as important as my adult interactions do now.
Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to see your own age at the time of that age. When we were second graders the fifth graders looked so big and mature. Looking at second graders and fifth graders today, they’re all a bunch of little kids whose “little kid problems” will be surmounted as they get older. But at that age it’s the whole world. Perhaps that’s just my emotional memory combining the discovery of the great big world around us with the objectivity of what that world actually looked like. Okay, I think that’s what I’m getting at…Emotional Memory.
It’s said that writers have stories to tell and that they’ll be telling them all their life. To me, when I hear that it implies that I have a story loaded and ready to fire off at moment’s notice, but that’s never the case. However, I would say at any given moment I have emotions I would like to bestow upon my audience, and through my writing and my stories I’d like to help conjure those emotions within my readers.
Not sure if this post made any sense. Perhaps I reverted to my 8 year old brain and simply spouted off the range of emotions I was feeling when going thru this old junk. I just really wanted to share these and not otherthink a grand essay rooting the meaning of it all. It’s just kid stuff.
Next post: The Progession of Completing a 32 page comic in two months! Stay tuned…