Dreamy But Disconnected

On individual taste, romanticization, and the lives we could have lived.

I put on Françoise Hardy this week, after learning that she had died, the French lyrics streaming into my studio as a late spring rain fell outside. I felt immediately transported to another place, a previous chapter in my life. One where French music and language abounded, one where city life was a given.

I sat there listening to Hardy on Spotify, wearing worn-out Carhartts and a down puffy vest, while I looked at beautiful photos of her online. I wished that I was dressed in something chicer (something like this) and that her voice was streaming from a record player and not my computer speakers. Don’t worry, I still had stripes on under the puffy vest—some standards must be maintained. But in general, the whole scene wasn’t really the stylish, arty, intellectual look that feels like another version of me, or at least, a version that I like aspiring to.

In some version of my dreams of myself as an older woman, I’m always in an airy apartment with gorgeous old hardwood floors, surrounded by books and plants, with artists flowing in and out the door for meals and conversation. Either that or in a seaside cottage with some friends sitting and drinking coffee in a glass covered patio or sunroom. I look at the old vinyl flooring in the kitchen of my rental, or the white carpeting in the living room, and begrudgingly remind myself that it's not things, objects, and possessions that make a life.

A friend recently told me about walking around her house with the book Le Sud (one of those gorgeous books that makes you feel like perhaps you made the wrong kind of choices because you didn’t end up living a life of airy picnics in the south of France), lamenting why her life didn’t look like that. We too should be having picnics on rocky cliffs and a salty breeze!

Circa 2014. I’ve been taking water photos for a long time.

There are the different versions of ourselves, the different lives we have lived, and perhaps even more dangerous, the ones we could have lived. The ones we feel bittersweet over having not pursued, the ones we could see ourselves in, if only just a few choices had been made differently. We wonder where the assorted paths would have led, dream about the hypothetical different realities other than our current one. For me, it’s not so much FOMO as it is feeling like there’s another version of myself out there which I may have abandoned.

Of course it’s a luxury to feel this way, to be able to choose where you live, what jobs you take. But there’s also something to feeling pulled to different realities, to feeling in-between. If you don’t tend to those sides of yourself, they easily feel like they’re disintegrating—firm ground eroding beneath your feet.

There are times when I look at glamorous photos of writer or art events from big cities like New York or Paris or Los Angeles and feel like I’m missing out—that I am not in the place where the creative energy percolates, or the connections abound.

Then I look out the window to a forest of evergreens in a downpour, or listen to the sound of waves churning in the wind, or spend time in the water with my plunging group, or watch a sunset from my bed as the clouds turn from white, to yellow, to pink, to dark purple, and remind myself that there are all kinds of tethers that keep us feeling like ourselves.

Not all lives can be lived, connections are where we make them, and there really only is the current moment.  

Listening to Hardy, I am reminded of my friend Jenny. Almost a decade ago, we each found ourselves in Paris at the same time. While only there for a couple of months, she made sure to get herself a small vinyl player so that she could play records in her tiny rental apartment. You know, the essentials.

We were both in some version of late-20s searching, trying to figure out what would tether a romantic sense of adventure in place, what experiences would feel like they were full enough to captivate the hunger of early adulthood. We used to meet up at cafes to encourage each other to write little vignettes. Try to capture a scene, a moment, a place in a collection of words. I bought a wavy black and white striped notebook from Papier Tigre. It had a red square on the front, and I wrote “paris”—no, no capitalization—in the middle.

I found that notebook a couple of months ago while going through my bookshelf. There are three pages filled in that particular notebook. Not because I didn’t do any writing in that time of my life, I just have a tendency to scatter my ideas over an assortment of notebooks and slips of paper. I wish that I had written more, of course—or at the very least, in one place—that I had a diligent journal practice which would have allowed me to dive straight back in, to read my own book.

In another life.

There are little scraps tucked in here and there, sentences underlined, surprising anecdotes hidden somewhere between to-do lists, ideas, and the general markings that fill up the pages. They are not pure sketchbooks, or journals, or notebooks—they’re a documentation of days, of moments, of periods of time, of the chapters of a life. Going through them is like watching the development of my own taste and preferences. I see the things that I wanted to be, that I worked hard at cultivating, and then I see the things that were just there, the things that were harder to escape because they were simply a part of me from the beginning.

There is much written about taste. About what it is, about how it develops, about how we cultivate it. We deem it “good” or “bad,” we make judgements about people we assume to “have” it or not. I often think of taste like some form of collecting: pulling colors, textures, places, forms, smells, and sounds that make us feel like ourselves and holding them close. We want to feel like the full version of who we are, and we want to declare it.

 As

Tahirah Hairston

puts it:

“Approaching taste as something you can buy into or project negates what I think it really means to have it: curiosity about the world around you, an eye and desire for beauty and congruence, and an interest in cultivating your personhood as you present yourself to the world.”

I’ve been thinking about taste in the form of longing too, of lusting after the lives that might have been, that might have defined us. The craving for something that looks different. It’s some form of nostalgia interwoven with the creative dreams and aspirations that still abound where we ask “who am I and what really is possible?”

As we declare and define ourselves, taste is as much a projection as anything, and we all project an image. I know that mine is cold-water, fern-loving, lady wearing stripes who spends her days penning ideas in a journal while drinking coffee quietly by the sea. No surprise to anyone, the day-to-day reality looks a little different.

Yet we hold to those projections as fact, compare ourselves to them, hold ourselves to them. We often wish for something different—perhaps something a little cooler, a little more polished—romanticizing realities other than our own.  

At its best, this romanticizing pushes us to enjoy things, find the beauty, create more of it. We seek out that which we find alluring, we explore new places, we stay curious. But pushed to the other extreme, it leads to a life of comparison, the chase of a reality that is in fact, not tethered to actual reality.

Current life.

“Keep it raggedy,” José González said the other night in this month’s Create+Engage session. He was speaking about how we show up in group settings, how we present, and what questions we ask—that we have a tendency to want to have some perfect, polished version, and that stops us from participating. That polished version is not where the good stuff lies. It’s in the not knowing, the unfinished, the unvarnished. That’s how we learn, that’s how we connect. That’s how we stay curious. It’s our ongoing, raggedy process.

Yet so much of our lives presents us with something else. It's easy to find in the pages of design magazines, on our phone screens, in coffee table books, in mood boards: all kinds of beautiful versions of lives where the raggedy edges, the requirements of everyday life, have been removed, swept under the rug.

It’s dreamy, but it’s disconnected.

To reconnect is to find our way back to our tethers. They are rarely digital. They are felt. They are heard. They are sensorial. They can be found in a song, in a book, in a person, in the line of a pen or a brushstroke, in a color, a shadow, in a form.

Art, in all its forms, is in fact an excellent tether.

***

On my playlist, I switch from Hardy to Jacques Brel and then to Georges Brassens, making a mental note that we actually do have that on vinyl. I look out the window at the bright green maple, the moody spring skies, the golden morning light.

I make coffee and grab a notebook. I know my future self—my nostalgic self—might be enchanted with this chapter too, and she will want to read the notes.  

-Anna

Today’s essay was written after reading this article about Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen).” Not only was I thrilled to learn that the words were originally written by a woman named Mary Schmich for her newspaper column, but it also led to me listening to the song again (yes, yes, I cried). So much of that piece hits differently 20 years later, and if you haven’t listened to it in awhile, it’s worth a revisit. Thank you for the link Brendan!

A good reminder that “nostalgia” is a really good writing prompt for anyone who needs one this weekend…

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The main cabin that we hang out at during our creative retreat. Papercut, 2023, Anna Brones. Available as a print and cards too!

MIDSUMMER CREATIVE RETREAT

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• “Wearing a bra was a badge of womanhood. And yet, really, it was like getting a mortgage: At first, it feels like such an achievement and a sign of maturity, and then it dawns on you that you’ve taken on a burden and there’s no going back.”

  Susan Orlean
  on lingerie

• “We have bodies that exist in the physical world and need to go places and touch things. We desire more of the world than what’s available on 20cm of glass.” We want the analog.

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