Have you ever been fourteen years old? It happened to me once. I got all my clothes hand-me-down from my childhood best friend who was always miles ahead of me on the righteous curve of puberty and even when those trash bags of musty clothes made their way to my closet I’d still find myself swimming in the polos, knees knobby and pale under plaid shorts too long even for the late 2000’s. None of those clothes ever felt quite like me, though I didn’t really know what that meant, but it was an inevitability of being poor and I took it in stride when I wasn’t tripping over the rumpled cuffs of jeans pooling around my beat-up sneakers.
I did the thing that most boys were doing when I was fourteen. Grew my bangs out long to cover a billboard forehead advertising a constellation of red dwarf pimples, all my little split ends curling around disproportionate ears, slick and a little bit greasy. The Justin Bieber cut. I was the kind of kid people called ‘adorable’ because I looked like I was trying so hard to be a heartthrob for someone and there was something so sad about it. It was a bit like getting a squeeze on the shoulder and a ‘good effort.’ The effort was large but not necessarily good.
I’ve always looked younger than I am. Baby face and all that. The resulting infantilization is inevitable–see a baby, treat it like a baby.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. Can you see the wheels turning in my head? I feel so disconnected from that person trying so hard to look older than he is. Do you know what I look like now? Just some guy. A coworker recently asked me if I’d been in Somerville that weekend (I hadn’t) because he could have sworn that he saw me walking down Broadway with my hair in a bun. I said that’s just the kind of place where there are guys who look like me.
My therapist also looks like me, a bit eerily. Our sessions all take place on Zoom so I have to be careful to avoid pretending I’m just talking to a recording of myself, otherwise I’ll start thinking I could be a good therapist.
I suppose I’m just less concerned now about trying to look a particular way. The less I try to make myself up to be the most original and interesting character in the room, the more I start to look like everyone else and then also distinctly myself.
I like looking cute. I feel best in high waisted wide pants with a big shirt tucked in, tastefully unbuttoned to show some chest hair. I haven’t shaved my beard since I was twenty because I’m a little scared that I still hate the shape of my face.
I went to a wedding this weekend at which I saw a lot of people I haven’t seen since I was nineteen or twenty and most of them didn’t recognize me. I guess that’s just what time does but I still found it a bit unsettling; my idea of myself shifted on its axis a bit. I imagine the way I look now as a sort of evolved version of me but in another’s head, the shape of me no longer fits. New visual information confounds the aged data.
Watching someone’s conception of me get fractured in turn fractures my sense of self. Suddenly I’m an abstraction of every face I’ve ever had.
Obviously I cannot recognize all of the little changes that have etched their way across the physical field of my body. I look in the mirror every day and see the same person who is undergoing such constant crawling refurbishment and I think nothing of it. I haven’t cut my hair since 2020 and I know that it’s longer than it was but it’s just my hair. How does my inattentiveness amount to all this massive difference?
Can you see that I still don’t really know what I’m getting at? Sometimes I can write myself into the correct train of thought. A lot of times I still don’t have all the pieces or I’m too busy juggling them for the entertainment of the people around me to lay them all out and talk some sense into them. I whittled my youth away caring deeply about the way I look and ending up looking like a loser anyway–unoriginal. I’ve sheared off some of the more superficial hang-ups about my physical appearance but still spend so much time in the morning arranging an image of myself to present for the day–unoriginal.
I don’t mind being unoriginal in my body. At least in the modern era, being original means you should be doing all the same stuff as everyone else but wearing different clothes.. I grew up in my best friend's hand-me-downs trying to stretch my body into the shape of his. I don’t really care that much about if I’m following trends or not–I usually am, it’s just not important to me. I wore skinny jeans when they were in. Baggy pants are the thing now and suddenly they’re all I feel comfortable in. Is it even that serious?
I’m just sort of falling into the shape of myself each day and loosely hoping that the people around me ‘get it.’ People at this wedding kept telling me I look good but what does that even mean? Maybe I just fit a bit more neatly into an expected archetype. Maybe what they mean is that my past attempts at appearing like myself were hard to look at directly. Maybe I look like a writer now. Maybe I look like a guy who lives in Allston, Massachusetts and has plants. Maybe I look like a guy who listens to folk music and has dense bookshelves.
I think I look my age now but that’s nothing. I’m this age regardless. I could chop off all my hair tomorrow and slip on some old skinny jeans that don’t fit my growing waist any longer and I would still be a writer in Allston, Massachusetts who lives in a greenhouse the shape of an apartment with all my books and the guitar I’m scared to touch.
Oh, am I talking about an honest sense of internal self? Am I writing about authenticity again? I can’t bear that. I just wanted to write about how I’m not fourteen anymore and I love myself or something.
I think I’m still a bit displaced. I think there are still some aspects to my presentation that are forced. I don’t even really believe that’s a bad thing. James Worth is a pen name, my heart is a character. I’m in conversation with myself, who is also my therapist looking at me through a grainy webcam, who is also some people at a wedding who have reshaped me in their memories to have long hair. That’s my defining thing now. Defiantly, it makes me want to cut it all off.
I want to be understood very deeply and so all I can think to do is make myself impossible to understand.
Does any of that make sense? I think that’s what I’m getting at. It doesn’t really make sense and that’s okay and it makes me angry. Life is not as comfortable as I’d like to have someone much older tell me it is. I’m rambling my way through it all and that is the mirror to my swollen, chattering mind. Right now I look like me because this is what I look like.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up and look like someone unrecognizable who is also myself. I think my clothes will stay too big because I find it comfortable.
jw
Inspirations
Obviously. A pop album hasn’t sounded this good in a while. Some of the songs are so strangely written and cringe-worthy that I have to imagine it was made to make me uncomfortable on purpose. 365 feels like the theme song of the Charli xcx persona and the beat turns me into a feral cat. An artist sounding exactly like themself will always throttle me back into my own honest conception of my creative spirit. When ur in the mirror ur just looking at me xx
Collaging Round-Up
I think this was the first time since I started collaging that I didn’t really force myself to make the collages be ‘about’ anything. I just liked the way the images look together. slow strata is sort of about sex and codependency but it’s also just an exercise in restraint. I wanted bigger clippings and less of them in total. They’ve both developed some meaning since I laid them out and tweaked them a bit but I don’t think it matters. I’d much prefer for these to be interpreted by the viewer than have something obvious attached.
This weekend I sold some collage prints and flower pressings at the local artist market, aka I hijacked the table my very talented sister rents there and she did all the work of occupying the table and sold my things for me. I think that actually watching someone buy something I made would have me violently nauseous. But in my removal from the sale, it’s a lovely feeling to know that some people are making space for my art in their homes.
I bought a shitty digital camera recently and have been having lots of fun taking pictures without the threat of the all-consuming phone screen. I’ve always liked good photography and it’s just another creative outlet I find myself wandering down in tandem with the endless writing. These are some photos I took at the wedding this weekend that made me happy. xoxo