7 minute read. Content warning: Discussion of mental health and depression, mention of body image issues and weight, reflection on personal identity and past experiences and themes of manipulation and dishonesty
chatGPT Summary: Kay reflects on their relationship with memory boxes, exploring how objects from their past, including a shoebox filled with mementos and a childhood diary, reveal the complexity of their identity and the inconsistency of memories influenced by mood and intention.
Vancouver, on stolen Coast Salish land and waters – I have been thinking about memory boxes. As a teenager, I kept a shoebox in which I stored random bric-a-brack that was given to me or that I felt was important to keep. However, I did it more because I thought I was supposed to rather than really considering anything particularly “precious”.
I know that some of this comes from my mother, who has instilled in me a belief that most things in life are impermanent and short-term. I learned eventually that when she left home as a young adult, most of her things were taken by other family members. None of her things were ever returned, and even when her mother died, in the frenzy of selling, keeping, and distributing that came after, I never felt like my mother brought home anything that was particularly precious or imbued with positive memories for her.
It was the same in high school. I remember my mother telling me that it might feel like everything was essential and urgent while I was there, but ultimately, the best thing I could do was get through those years and remember that I was unlikely to see anyone from these years again once I graduated. That the important things happened after high school.
I’m not saying I took all of that to heart. I certainly had my heart broken and engaged in teenage drama as much as the next kid, but looking back and now in conversation with some folks with whom I attended high school (and who are now trying to gather for a 25th anniversary), it is very clear that I am not a particularly nostalgic person. I am still friends with a trio from university, but even there, I left those year behind and reinvented myself once I left. At the time, I lived it up and experienced a freedom that many of my peers didn’t because I held firm to the philosophy that everything is finite. I could be king if I could convince others, and when it was done, I wouldn’t need to see anyone again, so why not do everything as loud as possible?
I am a champion ruminator, but don’t dwell on my past. When called on, I can recall a passionate tale from my youth: however, that is because I love storytelling and being in the spotlight, commanding the scene and the stage, and controlling the environment. I have no interest in reliving those days or spending more than a few moments swapping memories with others before getting back to the present or looking ahead. I love to try on new things and slip into different configurations of self, which makes it awkward meeting people from this body’s past. I usually feel worse after sharing or recounting a memory with others than feel closer or more comfortable.
A dusty box on a shelf
I have a single shoebox of memories I haven’t added to in 20 years. I have touched it in the past two years only because I was forced to move and needed to pack and then unpack it in my new apartment. I ended up stuffing it on a shelf in my studio. I keep it because…I am supposed to. In this, I am less nostalgic and more romantic. The box represents an existence, and if I were to be erased, the box would become something discoverable by others. It’s a prop made special by the hundreds of video games, books, or shows I have watched where the protagonist discovers a box, uncovers a story, or solves a mystery through objects found in an attic storage or time capsule. It is a treasure box or a collectable, but I don’t feel particularly drawn to any single object. I can pluck out a thing and tell someone about it, but again, it’s all theatre. It’s about the box as a whole – the entire script or collection. It’s about the potential discovery, and ultimately what it could mean without me.
The box itself reminds me of a pair of yellow shoes I wore until they fell apart, a sole eventually falling off in mid-step as I wore one shoe like a flapping puppet for months, unwilling to throw them away. This cardboard box would mean nothing to the person discovering it, and it’s only now, in looking at this dusty old thing and searching for meaning for the sake of this reflection, that I remember the pair of shoes. But am I better for the memory? Do I feel something special? I am still not particularly eager to throw things away, adding to landfills when an object can be kept, mended or pushed to continue serving a purpose, even when it embarrasses others or sacrifices my comfort. I buy shoes with the expectation that I will keep them as long as possible, and now I save up and invest in shoes that can be repaired at least once. Because it is a behaviour and value I still embody today, the “memory” doesn’t feel particularly important or powerful.
My fingers become dusty as I pull this forgotten box off a shelf. I am willing to engage in this walk back through time for the sake of this prompt, but I feel my stomach drop out as a catalogue of objects streams through my head. Contained within will be letters written to a name I no longer use and pictures of my body dressed and styled in such a way as to call into question the identity of who I am and who I try to convince others that I am. I am not ashamed of the person I have been, but I am not that person anymore. I hear my mother encourage me to squeeze out the most of my gender, acknowledging that the gender assigned to me at birth was at “a disadvantage”. I am confronted with how I followed society’s conventions, and am frustrated by my own complacency. This box may be filled with memories, but instead of being fond of them, they feel like evidence to weaken my claims of who I have become and wish to be. I don’t see the expressions of queerness, curiosity, creativity, or strength that I know make up the core of me and I am confronted with a stranger I know intimately. I feel the excuses and explanations rushing up, wanting to add them to this written reflection to recover some control and conviction, but I will deny the instinct. I am my past; my past is me. But I am also who I choose to be and who I want to be. I am also who I don’t want to be and who others decide I am. I have a choice, I have chosen, and people once chose to be with the person I was. I am the echoes in my mind, and I am a series of masks. No explanation will make a case for all the pieces of me, so I will resist.
I pull out the piles of letters, setting them aside without unfolding or reading their contents. I squint to avoid reading any addresses or names. I open and shut envelopes filled with photos. I cringe at the past person that was me, at their hairstyles and weight, barely noticing the other details in the images, distracted by the me-that-was. I find a photo from my graduation and spy the yellow shoes that used to be housed in this shoebox. I briefly flip through the one and only “diary” I ever had, its contents spanning almost five preteen years. I pull out an empty duct tape wallet, kept as a trophy of skill and craftsmanship. I finger a cassette tape that is a prize won from a high school prank, the contents of which I would never want to listen to or have someone else play, but I chuckle at the idea of someone in another time trying to find a device on which to play it, only to be truly baffled at its contents. Are you curious, dear reader? I put the cassette back, happy to have such a prize amongst the other objects. Another envelope is filled with wedding shots, and I feel the knot again forming in my stomach. I put the objects away, stuffing them back into the box carelessly and then pushing the box back onto the shelf. I haven’t removed anything because curating the contents would mean I would need to linger in the past, and this excavation was excursion enough. I will likely not touch it again until I am forced to move to a new home.
Shoe Box of Lies
There is a Barenaked Ladies song called Shoe Box. I bought the EP as a teenager because I bought anything that the Barenaked Ladies published. I would pull out the liner notes when I bought an album and repeat the songs repeatedly with an obsessive need to commit them to memory. They were my favourite band, and the last CD I ever bought was the album before they broke up with their lead singer, Steven Page.
It wasn’t until I had my first mental health breakdown in my twenties that I realized why so many of the BNL songs resonated with me. I didn’t know that Steven Page suffered from depression, and when I would feel a kinship to the songs, I wasn’t consciously making the connections between my own feelings and the lyrics. I would have denied that I could ever feel depressed – I was too happy and upbeat. What an idea!
It’s under my bed, it’s never been read
It’s in with my school stuff and my mom never cleans there
From my first little fib, when I still wore a bib
To my latest attempt at pretending I’m someone
Who’s not seventeen, doesn’t know what you mean
When talk turns to single malts, or Stilton, orMy shoe box (shoe box)
My shoe box of lies
Shoe box (shoe box)
My shoe box of liesLyrics from Shoe Box, Barenaked Ladies, 1995
The song Shoe Box, however, was not one I liked. The melody and harmonies I could hear were a delightful display of colours and textures that would roll over my tongue and skin, but as soon as I thought about the lyrics, I would rush to switch the track. The Shoe Box, in the song, contains everything that the singer is and what they never tell others about. I read somewhere once (many years after the song was released) that Page, the writer of the song, said the narrator was a young adult who was lying about his age to his older girlfriend. Unlike the other songs in the band’s early discography, this song struck too close to home. I might sing along with the chorus when it would play, but it was one of the only songs I would not sing word-for-word if allowed to play through to the end.
The Diary of a Young Me
As a child, I kept a diary not to record my thoughts or even as a way to express secrets I needed to share – I kept one for the possibility of its discovery. Everything I wrote down, I wrote down with the intention of it being found. It was more fiction than fact, filled with quotes from other places and not-so-secret desires. It was a prop in my daydreams when I would come up with scenarios of what would happen if the diary was discovered. None of the writings are about what happened or even what I really wanted, so looking at the pages now, I cannot do anything but cringe. There are pages where I repeatedly wrote a youth’s name because someone suggested I should like them. I added a lipstick mark to someone I was “pre-teen dating” because I saw it in a movie – even though I didn’t wear lipstick then and have worn it so rarely in my life, I think I still have that same stick somewhere in my toiletries. Nowhere are there confessions of actual feelings or desires of who I was or wanted to be, but rather, it’s a script that tells a reader what I wanted them to think. It is a juvenile tool of manipulation, even if it was never put to use, and rather than feeling ashamed for being silly and young, I am ashamed because it is very much a sign of what was to come and an instinct that I have to fight against still today. In a more positive light, it’s an early example of my creative writing and it’s as cringeworthy as my earliest sketchbooks.
It is interesting to me to think about audience in these early writings. I was obviously not thinking about an adult audience for these works, my daydreams concentrated on a peer or paramour and how they might react to these “secrets”. I think i might never have ever considered what would happen if an adult was to read these entries. This is made funnier by the fact that I rarely had anyone over when I was growing up with very few close friends. I didn’t take this diary with me places and the most likely reader of any of this nonsense would have been my sister. It was all fantasy and likely a lot of this writing was also dreaming up social scenarios I was likely to never have.
I am sure that some adults flip back through their diaries from when they were young with happy nostalgia, and I know that many more cringe at the content their young selves wrote down earnestly. For me, I am not embarrassed by the content because there is very little that is true. It is a work of fiction, sprinkled with pieces from reality and the barest hint of substance, and unlike the other objects in my memory box, I do not keep it in hopes that someone will read it someday. In fact, I’m struggling to understand why I keep it at all. It isn’t something I would want anyone to find now and it’s so vapid and devoid of substance that it’s hard to compare to my sketchbooks which I keep as a tool to mark my growth. I certainly hope I grew up and stopped writing things only to manipulate my readers but I have worked in marketing and I know the power of a well chosen word… And so – I put it back in the shoebox. My shoe box of lies and truth.
Technology note:
I continue to test the use of AI in my writing and artistic practice. I used chatGPT to create a summary for this blog and provide content warnings, and Grammarly to assist me in spelling and grammar.