An Eye, a Pencil, and the Threads of Continuity
I’ve recently rekindled a long-standing life drawing habit, but I need to practice drawing faces. My own face is the closest one available — so last night I sat down to draw it. As I focussed intently on my own eyes, pencil in hand, searching for what made those eyes unique, I felt a thread tugging at me.
Hang on a sec, I’ve been here before.
As a drawing-obsessed kid, I’d scrutinised these same eyes. This wasn’t the first time I’d noticed the speckles within the shades of green and amber. Or saw the way the iris seems to expand out of the bottomless depth of the pupil. Or tried to capture the slightly glassy, darker edge where the colour meets the white.
I’d forgotten that the eyes of your childhood are the same as your adulthood. Seems kind of obvious, but it was still a nice jolt to be reminded.
When life feels like a series of eras, it’s easy to forget the continuity. I imagine discrete blocks of time stacked up to form my personal history. There’s eras belonging to particular cities or groups of friends. There’s pivotal moments that create before’s and after’s. I can divide my life up into a sequence of jobs, or boyfriends, or houses, or haircuts.
So sometimes I surprise myself with these threads of continuity that run through everything. Things that remind me I’m the same person that I was as a kid or teenager. That I’ll still be looking into these same eyes when my hair is white and my skin is wrinkly.
It’s not that things don’t change — they do. But it’s nice to find out that they don’t change as much as I think they do. I wasn’t reborn in motherhood. I’m not reinvented by moving interstate. My identity may evolve over time, but I’ll always remain recognisable to myself.
I recently went to a music festival for the first time in several (kid-induced, COVID-prolonged) years. I stood in the middle of a dancing crowd: there was a teenage girl on my left with her eyes closed and hands in the air, on the right were two elderly ladies with big smiles and their shoes kicked off. I couldn’t help feeling like the midpoint in a timeline.
Recognising something in the attitude of the teenage girl, I was reminded of sneaking out to clubs, dancing for 5 or 6 hours straight to get my fix for the week. I’ve written before about the impact of my first music festival experience, and here I was again. Getting sweaty with strangers who feel the music. Maybe I’m not prepared to line up in the cold streets at 12am anymore, but I can imagine myself as one of the white-haired ladies still enjoying hip-hop in their 60s. Another unbroken thread in my life.
Whenever I’ve felt lost, I’ve thought back to those earlier selves. Looking for clues about who I am and what I should be doing. Is the part of me that wrote lyrics to made-up love songs as a kid, the same part that was enthralled by spoken word in my 20s, and the same part now writing this in my 30s?
I’ve realised that what began as a way to avoid team sports in high school has turned into a decades-long passion for yoga. My first life drawing experience was at a similar age and I’ve had a pencil for a companion ever since — picked up and put down through various stages of my life. I’m sleeping in the same bed I bought as a teenager and still reading books past my bedtime.
I remember reading a Dr Seuss book on my mother’s lap. I read it again at her funeral — and now I read it with my own children on my lap. Some things really don’t change.
My body has changed, my mind has changed. Every cell in my body has been replaced at least 3 times, and yet I’m still the same person. I wonder about our memories — is it only something so intangible and fragile that connects us to our past? If I forget, will the threads be lost? Or is there a hidden influence, unknown to me but that would be expressed through thoughts and actions, even if I forgot every lived moment that’s come before?
If there’s no physical continuity between when I was born and now, I wonder what carries these threads. It makes me think of the monarch butterfly: it can take 5 generations to complete their annual migration between Mexico and Canada. I know it can be explained by evolved instinct, but I’m still amazed by this multi-generational drive to get from A to B. This drive continues through an adult butterfly — through the physical changes of egg, caterpillar, and liquified pupae stages — and onto the newly emerged adult butterfly. A butterfly who continues the journey despite possibly having no chance of arriving in its lifetime.
And they say there’s no such thing as generational memory.
I’m beginning to think these threads continue beyond my own life. Perhaps they weave into the lives that come before and after. Maybe my great-great-grandmother wrote copious notes in her diary. I can picture her funny-looking ‘g’. Maybe my great-great-granddaughter will be a professional dancer, moving to the future-equivalent of disco reggae.
Maybe they both like sketching faces and spend a moment staring into the same green-and-amber-flecked irises that I did last night. They may even think to themselves ‘hang on a sec, I’ve been here before’.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this, check out more of my (free) Medium articles here: A little bit about me and my writing.
