Only Softness and Saturation

On trying to capture a self-portrait that tells the whole story

Photo by Kseniya Lapteva on Unsplash

I look down and see my left hand pinching the soft flesh of my right forearm, now pink and splotchy. A rush of cold overwhelms me, as if tiny icicles have made their way into my bloodstream. 

“Do you want a blanket?” my counselor asks. 

I pull my cardigan tighter against my chest.  “I don’t know if it would help,” I say. “The cold is coming from deep inside.”  In the depths of my body, I am shivering. Or wait, am I vibrating? “I think—I think my arms are vibrating, actually.” 

“That could be,” she nods. “Shaking is one way the body releases tension when it feels threatened. 

“Ok,” I whisper, wrapping my arms tightly around myself, confused as to what is happening within me. My inhalations are jagged and unsatisfying, my chest frozen and caged. To help me calm down, she walks me through a grounding exercise, directing me to notice the chair against my back, the floor against my feet. When it’s over, I burst into tears, my face puckered and pressed. 

“What are you feeling?” she asks.

“Confused,” I admit, in disbelief that my body would nosedive into fight or flight at the mere mention of past events. “I didn’t realize I was holding onto so much.” My body shudders again.

“And now?” she asks.

“Now I wonder what else lives here, beneath the surface.” 

//

When my writing group assigns a “self-portrait” as the theme for the month, my initial reaction is hard pass. I already know what I’ll see in an image of myself: flat hair, tired skin, bloodshot eyes. 

But then I read

Ashlee Gadd

’s The Art of Self-Portraits, in which she explains the power behind this art form. “I am both in front of the camera and behind the camera. I am the photographer and the subject. I am seeing and being seen. I am creating the art and I am the art,” she writes. Whoa.

I imagine myself in front of the camera and behind it, wondering what I might uncover. My sense of self has waxed and waned over the last several years, moving predictably from one phase to the next—and back again—like the moon. At times I’ve found it difficult to negotiate how much of me is the past and how much is the present, how much is Mother and how much is Self. Often, I’ve tried to disentangle the two from one another, holding each piece to the light to see what it holds. 

//

Rocking on my porch swing and staring at the bougainvillea, I lean my head back and breathe deeply. A sense of peace swims through me and a feeling flickers through my mind. I feel whole. Maybe more whole than I ever have. If motherhood was the storm that threw me to sea, then it has also been the lighthouse that brought me back to myself. I have stretched and expanded, slipping quietly past my own edges.  

I am suddenly eager to capture what lies beneath the surface of this current version of myself—in all my depth and wholeness. To see and be seen fully, in a way that only I can capture.  

Inside, I stand in front of the the kitchen window and snap a few photos. I see nothing in my eyes except exhaustion, nothing in the light except the crumbs on the counter behind me. Each attempt feels flat and one-dimensional.

I try again a few days later, and then again a few days after that. Still, nothing comes through. All I see is the surface.  Deleting photo after photo, I text my writing group. “I haven’t been able to take a self-portrait. And I haven’t written anything.” 

Kendra writes back, “I don’t know why, but I’ve been thinking you should paint your self-portrait.”

//

I drag a wet brush across the page, forming a silhouette of water. With the swirl of my brush, I bring pigment to the small rivers I’ve laid down, watching the colors drip and glide and go where they will.  I’m mesmerized by the movement, the way watercolors almost paint themselves.

In some areas, the paint pools into dark, vivid creases. In others, the colors melt, fading into one another, leaving only a pastel shadow behind. I paint and watch, paint and watch. When it dries, there are no harsh edges, only softness and saturation. 

I prop my portrait up against my desk, taking it all in. And this time I know. I know what is under the surface. I know what has been there all along. Just a mixture of colors and tones. A dance from dark through light and back again. 

---

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Silhouette."