POSER

Saturday, we had some free time before meeting our friend Shruti for lunch. So Michael suggested we pop into Brookside Gallery and Framing and talk to them about frames for some things that we purchased in New Orleans. We spoke with the owner, Sandra, about our needs and while she was working up a cost analysis for us, Michael was browsing around the shop. He noticed some postcard sized photography prints on rack and said “Hey, this is what you should do with some your pictures Cindy.” He looked at Sandra and said “She’s an amazing photographer.” I did not have a response to this, but Sandra enthusiastically told me she’d give me an artist discount on picture frames. Really, Sandra is great. She told it us it would be too expensive to do custom frames for the five 5x7 prints we bought in New Orleans and recommended we go to a craft place like Michael’s. Then she told me to bring in my prints and she would put them up for sale in her shop. I told Sandra that there was an odd shaped piece we’d purchased in New Orleans that I would definitely be bringing her for framing. I thanked her and then we left the shop.

And I threw up.

No…but I was dazed as we walked back to the scooters. I couldn’t wrap my brain around what had just happened. Then we met Shruti and after lunch the three of us went to the Brookside Art Fair. After passing by the third booth of photography, I said out loud “my work is total shit compared to this stuff.” Both Michael and Shruti disagreed, but I couldn’t help but think they were only protesting my statement to make me feel better. Michael and I left the art fair with a lovely whimsical painting of an octopus and I left with a crushed soul and “what am I even doing with my life” mental state. I’m a hack, a pretend hobbyist who got carried away and had business cards made up declaring myself to be a photographer. These people at the art fair, those are real artists. They are willing to spend the money required to display their photos to the public so that the people say “Ooooh” and “Ahhh”. Standing next to them, I am just a cheap, trailer trash substitute.

Then we got home and I had a comment on an Instagram post from Elizabeth saying that she’d love this picture for her wall. I made a mockup of a postcard using one of my Shuttlecock photos and when I showed it to Michael he yelled “WHY ISN’T THE NELSON SELLING THIS POSTCARD!” Then someone else left a comment on a photo on Facebook telling me that I take amazing photos and I don’t know who to believe. All of my followers are friends and family, people I’ve known for most of my life who were already fans. But what if they’re only saying all this to be polite? What if I am really like that person who goes to audition for American Idol who thinks they are an amazing singer, but really can’t carry a tune to save their lives, but you know..in photography form? What if I take my prints in for Sandra to sell and she takes one look at them and tells me the truth of what I have known all along, that I lack talent and my photos are crap?

Vulnerability. It is a pain in the ass.

I ordered a print for Elizabeth today. I will be submitting an order for postcards this week, as well as placing an order for special photography matting. I will have more prints made so that I don’t have to just use the ones from the art showing that never happened. Maybe I’m not a professional or one for big displays, but that doesn’t mean I lack talent. At least, that’s my mantra today.

THE SLOUCH

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Michael measured the Cabbage the other day and she is 4’9. She will be ten in September and she is just a little over a foot shorter than I am tall. Michael started talking about how the Cabbage is going to be a tall girl and I responded with “that means she’s going to slouch.” Michael gave me an inquisitive look, so I went on to explain how tall girls generally slouch in order to fit in with their peers. That’s where it starts. Then the slouching happens as a way to hide their bodies. Michael said something about knowing what it’s like to be a big tall guy so he gets it, but I’m not sure he really did get it. Sure he makes an impact when he enters a room but more often than not that impact is a resounding positive “wow! you’re so tall!”. The tone of that statement shifts when a big tall girl enters a room. I have rarely heard someone tell me that I look thin without using a tone of negativity and then adding an inquiry about my health. “You look thin! Are you okay?” is not a compliment. There must be something wrong with you at all times. You are either too thin or too fat. Too tall or too short. Really it doesn’t matter to you if you are either too this or too that. All you want is to be noticed for your abilities to think up cool things and do interesting stuff while having a healthy body.

Men are praised for being tall. Boys got Paul Bunyan and girls got Thumbelina.

We slouch because we learn at an early age that more value is placed on the shape of our bodies than the words we have to say. Slouching is way of saying “please don’t notice my height. please don’t notice that my boobs are big or not big enough. please just listen to the smart ideas I have running through my brain.” Sometimes the slouching never goes away because we have discovered that it hides so many insecurities. We’ve discovered a way to fold ourselves around those insecurities as a means of protection. We only discover years later that our spines were not designed for all of that protecting and that in order to relieve the stress on our spines, we must expose our insecurities. And it is hard. It is like having a cast taken off your arm and then having to straighten that arm after it has been fixed in position for months, but worse because the spine has been bent over for years.

I slouch when I’m tired and recently it seems that I am always tired. Michael asked the other day “don’t you just sit around and think about things some times?” I started to answer, but then he kept on talking, never giving me a chance to answer his question. I lacked the energy to straighten my spine and speak up. Instead , I just vaguely listened as he rattled on about his plans for changing the Supreme Court while thinking about my answer to his question. I spend my day thinking up solutions to problems. My job is a scientific puzzle. The spare thoughts I have are on things that I have control over, changes I can make, projects I can work on. I think about stories I can write. I think about how telling him all of this will make no difference. My words will fly in one of his ears and then immediately out the other. Answering his question will not change the things I think about. It dawns on me that it doesn’t really matter to me to have my voice heard. It is not a lack of confidence. It is just , I don’t know, a security in myself that doesn’t need that validation or at least I don’t need his validation. I stand up straighter as I realize this.

“Sing out, Louise!” Well… Louise did learn to sing out, while artfully taking off her clothes. To be fair, it was only a glove at first and if you notice, Louise is standing tall and proud, if not a little bit shaky while she peels that glove from her arm. I am not advocating that you become a burlesque act in order to straighten your spine and drop some insecurities, but if you think about it, it couldn’t hurt. Peeling that glove from her arm is a metaphor for peeling away insecurities. You do not have to literally remove your clothing. For years you listened to people tell you that you’d be so much prettier if you didn’t slouch. They never once said to you that your voice would be stronger, louder and heard if you didn’t slouch. But the song I sing out is meant to be read.

So I sit up straighter as I type.

MURDER OF CROWS

Snow geese

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I dreamt of a murder of crows sweeping over head in one large choreographed group. Their large black bodies with wings stretched out wide soared back and forth. They did not behave as a usual murder but instead swarmed together like a murmuration of starlings. I stood transfixed by the sight of them. In the mornings there’s a large murder of crows that, like the traffic commuters, fly somewhere south of the city. I have watched them from a window at work moving languidly as if through water, one by one, heading in that direction. In the evenings I have watched just the opposite. They come from somewhere south of my house and fly back to where ever they roost for the night. The crows of my dream were not like those crows from real life. Have you ever witnessed a murmuration? Hundreds to thousands of starlings move over a field or body of water like a school of fish, swooping and swirling together in dance. It is a breathtaking and mesmerizing thing to witness. Crows are not known for this behavior. They may travel in groups but they’re loaners within that group. Very similar to a gaggle of gothic teens. Also a crow is at least twice the size of a starling and watching them swarm in such a way was almost scary. Except I was not scared. I reached for a camera and frantically ran back and forth capturing the whole event in blurry photos.

Last week I wrote up a class description for the workshop I am offering at Camp Wildling. I have a very clear vision for this class and know exactly how I want to present it. I sent it off to Kelly so she could put it on the website and five minutes later I heard the first whisper. What makes you think you can teach a workshop on photography? I closed my eyes while gently pinching the bridge of my nose, nodded my head and thought “here we go.” I had wondered when my inner doubt and self saboteur was going to make it’s presence known. I knew it was coming because I just felt too confident about this workshop and my abilities to teach it. I did the same thing when I found out I was going to be hanging my pictures in a local restaurant for two months. I spent weeks tugging at my hair and gnashing my teeth, asking myself “what on earth was I thinking?” and telling myself I was not good enough for this. I never even realized I had gotten over all of that until I talked to Talaura in December. All of the worries about the showing that I expressed to her where technical things like how to hang the pictures. It was Talaura who pointed it out that none of my worries had anything to do with my artistic worth. I paused when she said this because there is some part of me that still has that doubt. That kind of doubt has just become so minuscule that I hardly even notice it.

A lot of folklore portrays crows as harbingers of death. We see them linked with scarecrows and Halloween decorations. They come across as dark and gloomy creatures cawing out ‘never more’ in poetry. A crow is more than this. There is some ancient legend about the fall of the Kingdom of England if ravens are removed from the Tower of London. There are six of them living in the tower now. The Pacific Northwest Native Americans believed that a raven was the creator of the world, carrying around a pebble in his beak until it was too tired and then dropping it in a large body of water. The stone became the land we live on. Crows are smart birds, maybe even as smart as apes. They use tools, sometimes even make their own tools and they recognize faces. Some crows can count. One lu-lu dream interpretation site I came across said the groups of freely flying crows in a dream represents your intelligence and suggests that you trust your instinct. Basically it means you should believe in yourself.

If this is the case, then may we all dream of crows behaving like starlings.

SHOCK THERAPY

With tiny pies as witnesses, I ran out space in the middle of a sentence.

8 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "With tiny pies as witnesses, I ran out space in the middle of a sentence."

I was rerouting a plug to a new power strip. For some reason I can’t remember now, I had to remove the plug from the power strip and reset it in another position. My fingers slipped down to the metal prongs of the plug as I pulled it loose and then I felt my fingers tingle and painful zap at the back of my neck that just happened to be touching the metal table I had crawled under to do all of this rerouting. I immediately let go of every thing as I screamed more in fright than in pain. Though hours later I could still feel a slight metallic warmth on the back of my neck and my fingers had a mildly buzzy feel to them.

I can’t remember the last time I accidentally (or on purpose) electrocuted myself. In grad school, I was alone in the lab one day. My research centered around scanning bacteria with different excitation wavelengths and collecting all the emission wavelengths for each of the excitation wavelengths. The idea was that each bacterial species had it’s own auto-fluorescent map, like E.coli’s auto-fluorescent map was unique and different from Salmonella. My research advisor had built this monster of a spectrophotometer for us to take our measurements on and something was always going wrong with it. This particular day, I turned the system on but nothing happened. I started checking all of the cords and plugs. When I got to the power cord for the laser line, the cord fell off from the metal attachment into my hand. I was holding a live wire. I guess I was grounded well enough because I did not get a shock. I stood there for what felt like minutes staring at the sparking electric current coming off the end of the wire and then I shoved it back as hard as I could into the metal attachment. There was a loud ‘POP!’ but then everything worked fine and I went ahead and collected my data.

I never told a soul about that cord. Not even my research advisor, who turned out to be a bit difficult and the only one on my thesis committee to not read my thesis. Later, he would be impossible to track down to discuss revisions. Then he’d tell me that it was the worst thing he’d ever read. I paid for another semester of graduate school to take ‘thesis hours’ so I could re-write my thesis and submit it for graduation. I did a complete re-write of my thesis and sent it to him. Months went by and I never heard back from him. Finally, Chris camped outside of the man’s office for three hours with my thesis and the sign-off papers. When my research advisor was confronted with Chris standing in front of his door, he just took out a pen and signed the papers. To this day, I have no idea if he ever read my thesis. My research advisor dropped dead of a heart attack maybe three years later. By this time, I was in Margaret’s lab and I had gained back some of the confidence my research advisor had stripped from me. When I was approached by his current graduate student to read over a paper that included some of my work to be submitted for publishing, I had no qualms in telling the truth. The paper had been written in the wrong style for journal publication and I told the graduate student that if he wanted it to be publish, he would have to re-write it. The graduate student did not quit disagree with me, but he said that this was how our research advisor had written it and that he wanted to honor his memory by keeping it the way it was.

That paper was never published.

Actually, none of the research that I did in graduate school was ever published. The whole experience ruined me for scientific writing. Margaret would come to me and ask me to write up some methods for whatever current paper she was writing up and I would stare at a blank word document for half the day before typing out three sentences and handing them over to Margaret. She’d send them back and I’d write three more. She’d keep sending things back until I’d completed a full paragraph of methods. I’m sure she must have felt like she was pulling teeth from me.

This is the worst thing I’ve ever read.

Those words have never left me. When ever I have to type up methods or help write an abstract for a paper, those are the words that come to me first before I can write anything down. Some times they would even pop up before I could write anything here. Those words became lead weights on the ends of my fingers and let me believe that I could not write. Not science, not fiction, not anything. Turayis asked me if I was planning on participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I hadn’t really thought about it until she asked and I’m still not sure I have the energy for it. I’m thinking about it. I might write something that is not the best thing you’ve ever read, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing you’ve ever read. It takes time to stop believing in things that just are not true.

Sometimes it just takes some mild electrocution.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Taking on this week like a warrior.

13 Likes, 0 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Taking on this week like a warrior."

I took up a 365 day photo project this year where I take a picture of myself everyday for 365 days. Many of you know I’ve done this before. I’ve completed two years. Almost completed another year. Skipped a year. Tried again for another year and failed. When I decided to do the project this year, I was thinking about how I felt after finishing the first year, how taking all of those pictures of myself made me actually like my face and body. By the end of it, I didn’t mind being in front of the camera. I thought about how I have lost that confidence. When I looked in the mirror now, my face looked bloated and saggy and sad. Forget looking at my whole reflection in a floor length mirror. So I’ve been slugging my way through this year’s 365 day project hoping to see something of me that made me feel less bloaty and saggy.

It took me two hundred and twelve days to get to a place where I thought “okay….okay. you’re not so bloaty and saggy.”

A few months ago, I travelled to Oklahoma to visit with friends. I stopped at the Oklahoma Welcome Center just outside of Kansas to take a bathroom break. When I stepped out of the stall, I came face to face with a woman wearing the exact same clothes as I was. Except she was thinner and pulling off the outfit way better than I. It took a second glance for me to realize that the woman I was looking at was actually me. There was a full length mirror right outside my bathroom stall. It was obviously a carnival mirror and two women walked in on me while I was taking a picture. Later that weekend when I was at the Jens’, I was getting ready in their bathroom and noticed that my reflection in their mirror was also very flattering. Again, I chalked this up to some weird quirk of Oklahoma. Like maybe all the mirrors in Oklahoma are carnival mirrors. Even when my doctor told me at my recent check-up that I had lost ten pounds since the last time I was in, I was not all that impressed. Maybe a little surprised. I’d stopped stepping onto the scale ages ago. It just never seemed to change and I stopped caring. I stopped trying to like myself.

Maybe it has something to do with getting rid of so much stuff, but I finally feel the loss of those ten pounds. I don’t only feel it, but I can see it. I see it in the mirror. I can see it when I look down at my body, when I’m moving through my vinyasa. I can see it in the pictures I take.

Finding lost confidence. That’s something to be grateful for.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Patina

4 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Patina"

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to sub a Saturday morning yoga class at the same place I'm teaching during the week. I've taken to setting up my mat in what has become obviously opposite of where all the other teachers set up. It's a strategic move. The space has mirrors on most of the two walls of the room. If I set up opposite of those mirrors, then the student are facing away from them. Mirrors are distracting and they pull your focus off your mat and away from just feeling what is going on with your body. That Saturday morning, I walked into the room and started setting up my spot for teaching. There were already a few mats down on the floor where some people had set up their space. My position put these mats on the front row. 

One older gentleman stood over to the side doing some light stretches. He looked at me and asked "Are you subbing for Gina?" I smiled and replied "Yes. I'm your sub for the day." The man made a face and then started to grumble as he walked over to his mat. Then he dragged his mat away from the front of the room. He stayed though. It was a big class and consisted of mostly the Silver Sneakers crowd. After class was over, several students came up to me to tell me just how much they enjoyed my teaching. One woman even asked if I was teaching any where else. I watched that older gentleman out of the corner of my eye as he rolled up his mat and then left. I hoped that I hadn't made the class too unpleasant for him. He had been so displeased that I was there instead of the teacher he was used to. So you can image how surprised I was to see him show up for my Wednesday class and then again for this last Wednesday evening class. In fact he was my only student on Wednesday and we had a great class together. 

Even though I only had one student in my class that night, I left there giving myself a little fist pump and a "YES!" because I had won over this older gentleman enough to keep him coming to my classes. These classes I'm teaching have had some pretty variable attendance from thirty students one day to one student the next. It's new to the schedule and the weather has been terrible. Getting a class established takes time. I am not upset when I end up with only one student. I am also getting used to this new schedule and getting back into a habit of writing down a class that can be adapted depending on the kind of students that show up. I am getting used to the pacing of a class and at times I feel at a loss of descriptive words. I'm a bit rusty or at least I feel a bit rusty at all of this. I am grateful for the validation that I'm doing this well. I am grateful for those moments while I'm teaching when I feel strong and confident. At some point during the class something will just shift into place and suddenly I will be all "Yeah...I totally know what I'm doing." Which is something I can't always say with confidence in other parts of my life.

I am thankful for above freezing temperatures. I am thankful for small but mighty dogs. I am thankful for my yoga practice. I am thankful for you.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

4/365 Jump

2 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "4/365 Jump"

Way back, when I was finishing up my Masters Degree, I was working really hard and writing my dissertation. My advisor did not read my dissertation before my defense, which I did not completely pass. My committee sent me away with revisions. I did those revision and my advisor again did not read my dissertation before my final committee meeting. Though my committee was happy with the revisions and passed me, I still had to turn in a complete dissertation approved by my advisor. Meanwhile, I had gotten a job in Oklahoma City and marked the calendar in our lab with my last day at OSU two months in advance. I spent those two months staring at my dissertation. On my last day, I took my lab key to my advisor and he looked at me confused. I told him that today was my last day. He looked at me and said "You can't leave. Your dissertation is the worst thing I've ever read." 

I was too shocked to argue with him or to even believe he had finally read the paper. My advisor had been unavailable every time I had gone to him to talk about my paper. For months, I had asked him at least once a day if he had read it yet or if we could sit down and talk about the paper. Every time he would either put it off or tell me that things were going just fine and to just keep writing. So for him to tell me at the very last minute that my paper needed a complete and total rewrite was like being dropped into the Arctic ocean. I managed to stammer out to him that my last day had been scheduled and on his calendar for two months and I had a commitment to this other place. I handed him my key and left. I enrolled in more nothing hours so I could have another semester to turn in my dissertation and earn my diploma. I heard nothing from my advisor for over a month. I rewrote my dissertation and sent it to him. Then Chris basically had to stalk my advisor to get him to sign off on the final revision. 

The whole process rocked any confidence I had in myself and things only got worse when I started that first job out of graduate school. I went into a core facility that required all kinds of molecular biology lab techniques that I had zero experience with. I don't even know how I got hired for the job and I was terrible at it. I would have good days where I'd get reactions started and a gel loaded and every thing would go just right. Then the next day I would repeat all of the steps from the good day and everything would practically catch on fire. The other women in the lab were not the most kind and it was often very much a Mean Girl kind of environment. It was not a big shock to me when the facility lost a grant that I was the first and only one 'laid off'. In fact I had already started looking for another job before I got the news. By the time I started in Margaret's lab, I was pretty convinced that I was not smart enough to be a research scientist. Since I had no other prospects or talents and was the sole breadwinner of our household, I didn't really have a choice but to join Margaret's lab. 

This turned out to be the best decision (other than the scooter purchase) I have ever made because this is when I started to get some of that lost confidence back. Turns out that I am not as dumb as I thought I was. I was just stuck in a job that was not suited to the way my brain works. Now I'm super confident in my work and sometimes I even say some really smart things. That confidence spilled over into other aspects of my life and for a brief moment I believed that I could do anything. My confidence got rocked again when Chris died. I just sort of lost myself, doubted myself, forgot that I was not just Chris and Cindy, but my own person. To be honest, my relationship with Michael hasn't really helped me regain that confidence. I still doubt myself. Recently I was asked to conjure one word to represent something I want in 2018 and was surprised (and a little embarrassed at the selfish idea of it) to see the word "me" float around in my brain. It reminded me of the video that's gone viral of the toddler who refuses help buckling her carseat. She tells her parent "You worry about yourself!" 

Worry about yourself.

In these first few days of this brand new year, I have felt more solid in myself than I have in the whole of all of last year. Some of that has to do with regaining some lost confidence and some of that is due to focusing more on worrying about myself. There's gratitude to be had in these lessons. I am grateful to feel that maybe, just possibly, I could do anything. 

THE DISAPPEARING GIRL

Instagram photo by Cindy Maddera * Jun 5, 2016 at 5:07pm UTC

See this Instagram photo by @elephant_soap * 5 likes

I don't know what to write here any more. Or right now any way. I start something and then I shake my head and say to myself "You can't write that. You shouldn't write about that. No one cares." I feel like I've been holding onto a conversation that I keep meaning to have, but I've been holding it for so long now that I don't even know if it's a conversation worth having. Yet it is a conversation that keep poking me in the back of the brain. It's the kind of conversation whose voices sound an awful lot like those ones that tell me I am fat, untalented and stupid. And what's even worse is that some of those voices have the same tonal inflections as some people who claim to love me. That's probably a sentence I shouldn't write, but there you have it. This show has a few hecklers. 

Thursday morning, as I crossed over the Oklahoma/Kansas border, I noticed an abandoned rest stop on the east side of I-35. I told myself at that moment that I would stop at that old abandoned Oklahoma rest stop on my way home. I would stop and take pictures no matter what time of day it was or where the sun was in the sky. I am so much like my dad once I get behind the wheel of a car. I will drive and drive and drive and wish I'd stopped here, wish I'd stopped there. Never stopping. But as I hugged the Jens goodbye Sunday morning, I reminded myself that I was stopping at that rest stop. I made my way out of Oklahoma City and north toward Wichita and before I knew it, I could see that rest stop in the very near distance. I was only slightly dismayed to see a "road closed" sign blocking the entrance road. I parked my car as close to the sign as I could, making sure I was far enough off the interstate and then started walking. 

I don't think I ever realized how far off the highways and interstates rest stops really are. It makes sense to set it back from the highway. People would be getting out of cars and stretching their legs. Dogs would be running around, hopefully on leashes. Rest areas are basically parks on a highway. I walked up the cracked entrance road and felt the familiar Oklahoma wind on my face. The rest area was dotted with cement tables, each one under it's own teepee frame. The grass had grown up tall between the cracks of the sidewalks. The prairie was slowly reclaiming this bit of land. I adjusted my camera setting to accommodate the sun blazing down from a cloudless sky and I started taking pictures. I walked the sidewalk between picnic tables to the abandoned bathrooms and past the abandoned displays of Oklahoma history. The only thing that remained in one of the glass cabinets was a faded map of the state. As I made my way back to the car, I realized that those voices that tell me the mean things where no longer talking.  

I have yet to process those images. They're still sitting on the SD card in my camera. I know there's one in particular in that set that I'll want a print of. I know there's several that would make great postcards. But more importantly? I know I have some talent. I know I am not stupid and I know I am not fat.