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Tag Archives: thirty at thirty

30 @ 30: body modification [#2]

20 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

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fun, the body, thirty at thirty

or possibly a fourth earring?

I thought after my post last week that took on the fairly weighty question of identity, I’d turn to something comparatively lighter this week and talk about body modification. Why? Well, it’s actually something about which my personal feelings have changed substantially over time … in that as a child and young teenager I was pretty categorically opposed to any bodily alteration, and today I find myself trying to decide where exactly my second tattoo should go, and whether or not a nose or nipple piercing is a wise investment.

Mostly, my youthful opposition to such things was a pretty simple matter: I was not a fan of pain. I was not anti-girly things as a child (though I insisted they went hand-in-hand with traditionally unfeminine things; more on that later). I was in love with my grandmother’s clip-on earring collection, for instance. But pierced ears sounded to me like the quintessential example of a bad time. Voluntarily allow someone to punch holes in your ears with a staple gun type thingy? I think not.

But the summer I was twelve this friend of mine visited from Canada, a fellow homeschooler from whom I learned a lot of worldly things. Such as what exactly a hickey was, and why it would be uncool to ask your mother what it was, or allow her to see that you’d received one from your boyfriend with the purple hair. Actually, the hickey-and-hair incident wouldn’t happen until we were a year or two older. The summer of 1994 we were thirteen years old and still spending our lazy afternoons reading through the vast canon of L. M. Montgomery and arguing over which of the young men in the cast of Swing Kids made our hearts flutter most fervently (I had a soft spot for Arvid myself). The point, though, is that my friend was, to my mind, a more worldly adolescent. While I was not entirely sure I wanted to be more worldly myself, I also knew I wished to impress upon her the fact I was not un-worldly.

Which is where pierced ears come in, insofar as she convinced me that to grow any older in our sophisticated day and age without pierced ears was simply not to be tolerated. And therefore, I screwed up my courage and we trouped down to a local jewelry shop to have the deed done. (The shop is still there on 8th street and still pierces ears, I saw the sign in the window when I was back in Holland last May). I wave brave, and it hurt less than I anticipated. Though I didn’t repeat the process until the summer of 2009 when, almost completely on a whim, Hanna and I went into a Claire’s in Downtown Crossing here in Boston and added to the collection (two more holes in my left ear, one additional one in the right). I can’t say I do a lot with them, since I can’t be bothered to change out the rings, but I do take pleasure in the fact that I’m a professional librarian with five ear piercings.

there will be a no. 2
I’m just not sure where, what or when

And now a tattoo. I’ll be upfront and say I harbored, for way too long, social prejudice against tattoos as something tacky and faintly unhygienic and frighteningly permanent. In my early twenties a friend of a friend got an ankle tattoo for her sixtieth birthday and I thought that maybe I could picture something like that … far into the future … when I had a better sense of who I was, and what I might want to say with ink worked into the very fabric of my skin. Maybe.

But in my mid-to-late thirties, my opposition started to melt. In part due to exposure to some exceptionally gorgeous ink on friends and acquaintances. I won’t lie: beautiful tats are much more visible here in Boston than they were in West Michigan. I see them on co-workers, professional colleagues, the coffee shop baristas, commuters on the T. When you see that much beautiful art around you, it’s hard not to start thinking, “If I ever … then I might …”.

I figured completing graduate school was as good a place as any to start. You can read all about why, what and how here.

Maybe I grew into myself faster than I used to imagine I would. Or perhaps I’m more comfortable with the notion that we are continually changing but that it’s okay if our bodies carry the scars of our previous selves: joyful and visible ones as well as painful and/or invisible ones. Chosen as well as involuntarily acquired. Human-created rather than physiologically made.

I’m still wary of body modification, in part because I’m just not that into pain and also because I try to be as accepting as I can be of my body as it is, rather than attempting through intervention to make it conform to my own (or to societal) expectations of how a body should be.

But ink, particularly, is something I’ve grown to believe can serve to celebrate the body as it is. After all, it draws attention to one’s physical presence, and insofar as it is a self-chosen form of visual symbolism communicates aspects of ourselves that go far beyond what we have been trained to assess when we visually assess our fellow human beings on the street. Tattoos demand that we be understood not just as bodies of a certain shape, skin color, weight. They also demand that we be understood as bodies. As physical presences that have been purposefully decorated in ways that are meaningful to the individual body in question. Tattoos are a way of tying our metaphysical, meaning-making selves to our corporeal, physical, taking-up-space selves. Much of their power, I would argue, comes from the fact that they are an art form that bridges that boundary between metaphysical and material being-in-the-world, and grounds that bridge-building in individual human flesh.

Not sure where I’ll be inking (or piercing) myself next, but you’ll likely hear about it on this blog. So stay tuned!

30 @ 30: questions of identity [#1]

13 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

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history, thirty at thirty

Glen Nevis, Inverness-shire, Scotland (May 2004)

When I was seventeen I enrolled in a college writing course the title of which was Questions of Identity. It was a required course intended to teach incoming first-year students what was expected of in terms of written work during their college years, but each faculty member was allowed a fair amount of autonomy in terms of content. My professor (for whom I harbored a major schoolgirl crush) framed it in terms of memoir. We read Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood and Tobias Wolf’s This Boy’s Life (I still remember the bit about the beaver in the attic). We read creative nonfiction essays about everything from the Holocaust to Italian cookery. We wrote autobiographical essays.

I loved it so much, I turned around and took another class from the same professor the following semester, where I wrote more memoir, and the semester after that as well.

What strikes me, looking back on the content of those essays is what the subjects of those papers reveal about my primary question(s) of identity. They were not questions of sex or gender, of religion or race … though I’m sure one could find markers of these aspects of identity throughout, they were not the categories I was then thinking in. I was simultaneously taking Christian Feminism and Feminist Theology, so sex and gender, sexual orientation and religion were very much on the table … but not what preoccupied me when it came to identity. I already took for granted being a feminist; sexual orientation was puzzling but not a burning concern. By 1998 I’d pretty much given up on the church, though I found theology a powerful language with which to discuss human rights and justice.

I didn’t choose these subjects to write about in English class. What I chose to write about, primarily, was friendship, family, and my experience with home education. Looking back, I would argue that these essays all implicitly explore how the experience of home education helped shape the nature of my closest relationships. As a teenager, I was working hard to establish relationships outside my primary kinship network (which I planned to maintain, but was ready to expand beyond). And I wasn’t particularly sure how — or, more particularly, how to do it well.

Two of my major papers during that academic year hinged on an examination of intense friendships — one a intimate childhood friendship that had ended painfully, another a portrait of a young man I had worked with the summer before and felt both attraction toward and irritation over. The following autumn brought a third paper that was a profile of my then-closest friend, a young man with whom I carried on a passionate correspondence (yes, these were the days when pen-pals actually used pens). I also authored two papers specifically about the history of home education — my own family’s experience and the broader movement — as well as pieces about my childhood family life and one paper for which I shadowed a friend who attended the local Christian high school.

Home education played a central role in all three friendship essays. The childhood friendship (looking back I would argue this was my first romantic female friendship) was with a girl from another family that home educated and our two families were extremely close until I was in my early teens. I made connections with my pen-friend (still a good friend today) through a long-distance homeschool writing group, and the man for whom I harbored complicated love-hate feelings was a grown homeschooler. Part of the attraction I had for him was the seduction of being close to someone seven years older than I who was an adult, but had had a (superficially) similar childhood experience to mine. While I didn’t necessarily conceptualize it this way at the time, looking back I would argue that part of the work these papers were doing was helping me to understand  how central my experience as a homeschooler had been to my childhood, and how central it would continue to be as I moved into adulthood. Would it color the relationships I formed? Would it be easier for me to form bonds with people who, like me, had grown up outside of institutional education? Would the experience of college alter my identity as a homeschooler, and if so what would that mean? What was my relationship as an individual to the larger (and wildly heterogeneous) community of other home-schooled people? To what extent did being a home-educated person make me “weird” or cause communication or cultural translation problems with my fellow students at college and the faculty under whom I studied? How would I be able to move into a culture (college) where I was no longer surrounded by like-minded individuals (fellow homeschoolers) and still retain those aspects of my identity that I felt were important?

When I was a young child my mother once asked me how many children  I thought were homeschooled like us. “Oh, about half,” I told her, after a moments consideration. This was an accurate reflection of the proportion of people we interacted with regularly who were home-educated or in more traditional situations. In other words, as a young child I assumed that my experience was normal. As I grew older and faced the skepticism and suspicion and saw friends approaching learning in radically different ways from my own family, I came to understand that our family’s choices were very different from those of the dominant culture. I realized that home education was something that marked me as an outsider. Those things that we feel mark us as different (from the implicit norm) are a more conscious part of our identity than those things that seem normal.

By the time I was seventeen, home education had become a self-conscious part of my identity, but also one that was precarious as I moved into college coursework. It became a project to understand what, exactly, that part of my identity meant to who I was as a whole person, and what it meant in terms of my relationship to others.

In some ways, this exploration is still ongoing. I don’t think it is a mistake that Hanna is also a grown homeschooler: in some ways our experiences were quite different, but nonetheless it is a part of our growing up that neither of us has to explain to the other, or defend to the other as an insider speaking to an outsider. While I’ve had close friendships over the years with people who never homeschooled, I continue to feel a particular kinship with those who have. And, as the subject of my Master’s thesis shows, my consideration of educational alternatives has continued to be central to my identity as a thinker and academic.

At the same time, the anxiety that attended my written exploration of my education and its connection to my intimate relationship bonds has abated considerably. I still think about how my growing up has shaped the person I’ve become (a lot!), but then I think a lot about most things in my life. It’s just the way I work. I still have a special place in my heart for home-based education, and feel that spark of automatic affiliation with folks who are homeschooled or homeschooling. Yet it isn’t so present in my life as it once was. At seventeen, it would have been one of the primary ways I introduced myself to others; now, new acquaintances often know me for months or years before, depending on the conversations we have, the topic arises. At seventeen, I likely would have felt unable to be known to others if home education remained undiscussed. At thirty, I am more relaxed about letting my personal history weave itself in to present-day narratives in its own time.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to mentor younger folks in the home education community; and I still have that oral history project with grown homeschoolers I’d love to complete! We’ll see in the next thirty, sixty, or ninety years how much it continues to play a role in my life.

You can read more about my reflections about home education in this interview I gave over at I’m Unschooled. Yes, I can Write.

30 @ 30: series introduction

06 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

≈ 2 Comments

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blogging, thirty at thirty

So back at the end of March I threatened more posts about turning thirty. I’ve finally decided to follow through on that threat (promise?) with a series of posts I’m going to call “30 @ 30.”

I’ve been thinking a lot these passed few months about the discourses surrounding childhood and adulthood, the supposed merits or limitations of each phase of life, and the markers of maturity or immaturity our culture fixates on (having a “real” job, being financially independent, owning a house, marrying and having children, etc.). At first I was thinking about writing a pair of posts talking about why being a child isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (in response to those who complain about how adult life sucks) and about the reasons I’m glad to be an adult and don’t auto-dread being called “ma’am” or turning forty.

But that seemed, in the end, too negative. And destined to make friends of mine who have more conflicted feelings about adulthood pissy. So instead, I’m going to try and write a series of posts reflecting on how my own thought and experience has evolved between my childhood and my (as-of-now) adulthood. Not necessarily in a better/worse way, but in more of a continuity-and-change way. Because that’s the sort of person I am: I tend to emphasize the constants while also thinking about the way the external manifestation of those constants can radically change over time. Maybe along the way I’ll discover some of the subjects on which my thought and experience has changed dramatically over the years. Some topics I plan to explore (in no particular order of importance):

  • food tastes
  • sexuality
  • pornography and feminism
  • favorite fictional characters
  • physical movement
  • gender
  • identity and labels
  • asking “why”
  • the internet
  • friendship
  • urban living
  • England
  • wearing jeans
  • coffee
  • french kissing
  • body modification
  • school
  • money
  • travel
  • work / vocation
  • children and childcare

Stop by each Wednesday for series installments. This is also part of my attempt to haul this blog back into being more diverse than a book  and fic review space. As enjoyable as that is (and I plan to continue, no mistake!), I’ve missed more narrative and personal writing.

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"the past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door." ~ Emma Donoghue

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