Personal Statement - Lucy Gardner

There are days I look back at Polaroids of myself and see a stranger. Moments in time where I am frozen: eating cream cheese-coated toast with a dollop smudged across my cheek, running towards the ocean during a storm, standing on a toilet outside of a thrift store. The figures in the photo are all me, yet at the same time, they are not. They are only timed exposures, stills, preserving a second of my life, leaving the moments before and after it in Memory. Between each photo, I have grown, matured, and finally cleaned the cream cheese off my face. But the girls I once were are a mirror to who I have become, and through their reflection, I have finally seen myself. 

Each Polaroid, and there are hundreds, gave a unique frame of my life. They were documentations of my day-to-day from the perspective of anyone other than me. The camera passed from friend, to stranger, to friend, allowing me to flee myself by looking through the perspective of someone else. Yet, coupled with Memory, the Polaroids became their own entity. They begged a thousand words to give them meaning, and in the process, to give me meaning. So, I wrote. 

I wrote my first memoir piece using a picture of myself at a Thanksgiving lunch. I was outfitted in a floral dress. On one side of the room, my mom held a ladle to her mouth. Beside her, my grandmother stood frozen with her mouth parted. In the middle, I looked away from the camera lens, letting whoever was behind it photograph me. The photograph was mundane, but the narrative behind it was not. My mother argued with me over if I would miss her cooking when she died. It was not so much an argument as a pronouncement. I would miss her cooking, and if I didn’t, I wasn’t her actual daughter, but an imposter. I felt like an imposter, clothed in my own skin, yet stripped of personal identity. I was a daughter, a granddaughter, and a sister. But who was I? I did not have the answers yet, but the photograph illuminated what it meant that I did not face the camera lens; I was not ready to face myself. 

I wrote myself apart to bring myself back together. I started by describing food–the medley of flavors blooming on my tastebuds, the dishes’ heat causing my cheeks to flush, and how it all smelled like home. I found that home consisted of just as many flavors as the dishes did. I too consisted of just as many ingredients. I was a daughter, a sister, and a granddaughter, but I was also me. The components of my recipe were not limited to those roles but enhanced by them, with an added tablespoon of experience. 

Experiences documented through others’ perspectives departed me from myself. When I wrote, I returned. I poured my thoughts onto the page and realized I was perceived by others, but I was also the perceiver. I found a little bit of myself in them. And through writing, I found that the beauty of those roles and my place in them was that it gave me a way to see the world from my own viewpoint and a way to see it from others. 

Creative writing gives me a place to present my thoughts after they have simmered. It allows me to see the world in new ways, and in doing so, to continue to see myself in new ways as well. I am perceived by the world, I perceive the world. But in being an ingredient in both, I get to create a new perception, one looking towards the past, vying for the future, and mixing them to write the present into being.