Day 191: Finding Myself In Paris

Paris, Day 20. I've been here just about three weeks now and it's coming clear to me how deeply important this time in Paris has been.

Without going into the surface-level details of what I've actually been DOING (making paper dolls, dancing spastically in my kitchen, listening to a weird mix of Bach, birdsong and banjo), what's been HAPPENING is a gut-level self-knowledge I didn't even know was possible.

I thought I knew myself pretty well until I got here.

It started as a kind of tinkering with scrap paper and Crayola markers. Lists of things I want to do, places I want to see, stuff I want to learn. Different colours, different styles of handwriting, little doodle drawings here and there.

I wrote pages of these multicoloured brainstorms. Gradually, they got more specific and more about the present. Things I Really Love: being near water, Motown music, my close friends. Then it became My Ideal Life. Which turned into an Action List containing scary things like: enroll in a drawing class and a French class, take a physical theatre workshop, start dancing again.

I started working through the Vein of Gold, doing things like writing out my entire life story in five-year chunks, a very revealing exercise.

I realized I've been searching for a home since I was 11 years old. I saw that the happiest periods of my life involved performing and being connected to my body. That I've been blessed at several points with amazingly creative and loving collaborative 'families.' That isolation doesn't serve me well, but solitude does.

I realized that 191 days ago, I took on an idea of what it meant to be an artist without really considering what that means for me. Six months in, I'm finally finding out.

I keep going deeper. And I keep learning more. I've never paid such close attention. It's like a new romance and I'm soaking up all there is to know about my lover.

Through this process of discovery, surface-level changes have started to emerge. A love for photography blossomed and took root. I bought a sketchbook and pens...and started using them. I've begun work on another one-woman show. I have plans to visit a famous bouffon (physical comedy/clowning) teacher next week. I've taken to wearing sparkly earrings and skirts.

Paris, it seems, is the place I find myself.

The first time I came to this city, I was on a tour bus with my mother. The outskirts of Paris are hideously ugly and looking out at the scummy graffiti-ruined housing projects, I started to regret coming.

But as we drove through the wall, the architecture began to transform, becoming more and more glorious the closer we got to the centre. I remember the bus reeling around a bronze statue backlit with waning daylight. That feeling deep in my body: I'm home.

I'm realizing that sense of home I've been searching for (and find when I'm in Paris) is not about where I live but how. In Paris, I inhabit myself. I make myself at home. I make myself a home, existing in a way that is completely, authentically me. Without the history, expectations and assumptions of my life in Canada. Without compromise.

Self-indulgent? You bet.

Parts of it are not sustainable – like the diet of bread, cheese and chocolate – or even desirable – the relentless urbanity leaves me cold. I'm not clinging to this city as some kind of life-raft for personal authenticity, but Paris allows me to exist as a purely creative being – without the demands of also being a girlfriend, co-worker, taxpayer, sister and friend.

And so, this gift comes with a challenge. How can I carry this sense of deep self-awareness and fidelity with me as I step back into the hubbub of so-called real life? How I evolve my 'life as creative act' and avoid sliding back into strangle-hold of habit? Where will this journey take me next?

The short answer is I don't know. Leaving Paris will be much like coming here in the first place – a giant, blind leap of faith.