Thoughts on a Postcard Please

Are we malleable enough to be manageable, us wild women, artists, writers, activists, rebels with a cause? Do we need a man to plan our day, ensuring his expectations are met, nay exceeded even? Must we have a boss who steals our ideas, taking all the credit and leaving us micro-managed and empty? Thoughts on the back of a postcard please.

My postcard has a picture of a baby, round-cheeked and charming. Cherubic mouth surrounded with ice-cream, blowing a raspberry to the world. We are not born to be shoe-horned into a specific box or achieve a certain set of criteria. We are born free. We don't know it of course, indeed we have few memories, if any, before the age of five. The balance of power between babies and their parents is fascinating. They can try to tell us when to eat, poo and sleep, but we don't have to do it. We can tell them when we want to eat, poo and sleep and woe betide them if they ignore our demands.

I take another postcard. A small child in wellington boots, kicking her way through a pile of autumn leaves, not a care in the world. She marvels at the colours, the crunchiness, the rustling of the leaves as they are displaced. She wonders how this would look as a painting, how it could appear as words on a page, how it might sound as a piece of music. She does this at school, in lessons, instead of listening to the teacher or focusing on what she is supposed to be doing. She gets into trouble, her colouring pencils are confiscated, her parents are called in. Her spirit is dampened but not broken.

The next postcard in the series depicts a teenager dressed in black, staring moodily above the camera lens, her own camera dangling from her right hand. She prefers to snap pictures rather than talk to people. This too gets her into trouble.

There are more postcards. A student in baggy clothes, a worker bee in a 1980s tailored suit with resplendent shoulder pads, a wife in cream silk and lace, a mother herself, holding the hands of two small boys. I tried to fit in, I really did. To conform, to do what was expected of me. But to be honest, I didn't try that hard and certainly not for very long.

I fell asleep in lectures but still got top marks. I got through long, tedious days in an office by drinking too much wine just like all my colleagues. How any deals got made, I will never know. I ran away from my marriage after seven years. I taught my boys to be kind, generous, beautiful humans.

I have lived my adult life in a reasonably high-functioning manner. I have mostly lived it my way. Every time my head overrules my heart and sends me into a workplace I know is going to be a disaster, I fuck it up. And that is fine. I circle back to where I belong, to a creative space that is mine, and mine alone, that sometimes I share with like-minded people. Am I manageable? Like hell am I!