Who's In Your Boxes
Hello from the dreamland, people. Sorry for the significant delay; every trip home is fun and games for the first couple of days when you’re just walking around, taking in all that you missed, hanging out with friends you left behind, blasting through streets and venues you craved; but when you settle in and life starts knocking - it’s overwhelming!
It’s not just because it’s been a while since I wrote, but I’m super excited about this post. The most favorite thing in the entire world for me is accidentally running into something that ends up impacting me.
Sometimes we look around, desperately, trying to get inspired, and it doesn't happen. We search for something that was there all along, something we felt before we started to know. When we just started tasting life.
Then life takes on, and we lose ourselves.
My life was an epic roller-coaster before I moved back to Los Angeles. The work got mixed with the private life, a private life got mixed with everything else, my head started to get blurry, and I couldn’t see anymore: where, why, who, how?
Where am I, why am I here, why am I with those specific people around me?
I couldn’t see my path anymore, and I’m one of those freaks who knew what they want to do in life and how they wanted to live before even reaching full-fledged teendom.
I just wasn’t there all of a sudden.
I let everyone cloud me; the people, surroundings, location - everything. Brain on auto-pilot. Just let it ride out.
The last couple of days before my trip, I went to see my family to kiss them all before I go (they’re used to seeing my tail in the wind by now), and also to drop some stuff with my mom that I didn’t want to carry overseas.
I was digging around the house to find some secret spot for my stash (I don’t like people going through my things), and I came across the piles of boxes named simply – MIRANDA. Well, it’s not actually a treasure hunt when there’s my name on it, still, I felt excited to discover what was there.
I could not believe what I found.
I could not believe what my mom saved throughout the years.
She saved everything I made, wrote, created, sewed, knitted, drew, painted.
My mom is a really talented artist, she can transform a rotten piece of furniture into a brand new glorious-looking piece; she draws, sews, builds, and I got all my artistic talents from her. The only difference being - she did not pursue hers, and I pursued mine.
She went on to study medicine at her parents’ orders; I did not follow anyone’s orders. I studied what I wanted, and I guess looking at me pursuing my dream, she always regretted not pursuing hers. I guess that’s the reason she religiously kept all my art stuff, even from when I was a small child, throughout elementary school, all the way through my art school and college where I created some serious art.
The boxes blew me away. There was a wooden board I used to lean the paper on before I drew or painted, and the board is full of quotes, lines, and tiny stories I wrote while waiting for the artistic inspiration to hit me.
I found my childhood scribbles, all my 3-6 y old attempts at artwork, my actual artwork, all my high school art pieces; my college pieces, the copies of art pieces that I sold for an exhibit, all the graphics and numerous prints, all my linoleum carvings and prints of the same - just EVERYTHING.
Everything creative I made and left behind after being graded, she picked it all behind me and boxed it.
Staring down the boxes of what I made my entire life and all the items that were ME, was like staring into the freakiest of mirrors. I realized how little I regarded all that I made at the time, and always just wanted to skip town, leave, grow up already, and move to a different country, continent, planet. Looking into my boxes, it hit me: how silly we can be, how easy we can forget, how easily we lose ourselves, and how important it is, especially at times when we skip a beat, to remember where we started!
I couldn’t take all my stuff in the boxes I discovered with me overseas; after all these are important items to my mother now, a sort of treasures she likes to have in her home, both reminding her what she could have been and a connection to me while I’m gone (all the time).
All I took with me is the collage you see in the picture in this post.
To realize I created moodboards before I even knew what moodboards are (or the rest of the planet), to see my enthusiasm for studying someone’s clothes and what they meant to society at that time, to see how engaged I was in details, and the rawness of where I was going with it, a clear path of what I will become later in life.
It’s priceless.
It was priceless to realize my childhood collages and moodboards were forerunners of my path and passion of creating magazine pages, later online pages of content that take on the analysis of clothing, design, culture, and society that consumes it, rather than just making clothes.
We knew so much about what we are and who we are before we got clouded by experiences, people, time, life. Sometimes, when we’re lost, it’s good to go back to the beginning of it, it’s good to take a peek at how we started, understand where we detoured, and figure out a way back to what we knew all along - exactly where we should be.
What's in your boxes?
Or better yet, WHO's in your boxes?
