Growing up, I was one of four girls in an oil painting apprenticeship for an artist we’ll call Jane. Jane had stark white hair and a lofty studio on Butterfly Lane by the beach. She greeted us with homemade cookies and crushed her own cochineal. She taught us how to spend days on a shadow and a single brushstroke on a wine glass.
Studio days were also when she told stories of her childhood in Jamaica, or her decision to commit to painting professionally later in life (despite the opinion of a once-skeptical husband). Those late-afternoon hours were filled with tales of great friends, loves, and disappointments; stories that became blueprints we could decide to take, or not, for ourselves.
Jane was full of non-sequiturs, and one day she said: “Remember that there are some things you don’t ever have to tell anyone else.” At the time, I understood this as “keep your secrets to yourself,” but now, 15-ish years later, I’ve reinterpreted her words: There are some things you just don’t have to tell. There are some things that are not secrets to keep, because that implies you are withholding something — something whose interest and value increase simply because it does not belong to you, but is being hoarded by you. That is what a secret is, and it’s not what I believe Jane was referring to.
The older I get, the more stories I have not to tell. This especially true as someone whose 2020 took a few tailspins, and whose definition of friendship has become consequently more action-based than ever.
In the new glow of 2021, I see Jane’s words as a lesson in eschewing the chase for external validation, in accepting that there are some things, many things, that grow and evolve in value solely based on our own internal processing of them. Simply put: We are enough.
But I also wonder the extent to which this is really possible, so I want to ask Amanda and Alice: Are there some things we never have to tell anyone else, and if so, what are they? MFK
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