The Color of Control

           I'm currently reading The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, and it's really cool to be reading so much about color history and science, even though the book is really snippet-y. Everything sort of feels like a snippet or blurb since the author goes over so many different colors and only gives each color 1-3 pages. Plus the entire book is heavily indented, huge huge margins so the writing takes up even less space than a full page. 

            I only comment on that because I just wish the book was denser and more detailed, but I sincerely can't imagine the amount of research and work it would take to fill this book out even more than she already has. Kassia St. Clair has done such an amazing job researching and writing this (so far, I can't wait to finish reading). 

            The book has reminded me a lot of how color-obsessed I used to be - I was a certified regular at Charming Charlie's, back when it was alive, well, and booming. When I was 16 and 17, I could not be stopped when it came to color. I wanted to read about it, learn about it, talk about it, stare at it, smell it, inhale it, and it was such an interesting dichotomy for me at that age because I normally wore mostly black, and at the time was a ceramicist who refused to glaze any of my work because I preferred the white dust of my porcelain variant. I still wore way more color back then than I do now, but generally I avoided it in my work and in my wear, but I constantly found more controlled ways of engaging with it.

            Underneath my bathroom sink, was a vibrant and extensive collection of nail polish. Next to it were a few large and old eyeshadow palettes, with electric and vivid color stories. On my dresser was a small collection of the sparkliest, brightest costume jewelry you could find at a Charming Charlies or Charlotte Russe. And hidden in my backpack, was a tin case of 48 watercolor pencils, gifted to me by my secret girlfriend, the most vibrant and vivid person I had ever met.

             Colors for me were weird ways that I controlled my focus and energy. I only really allowed myself to wear color to the extent I wanted to when it was a special or important occasion. I could (and frequently would) obsess over colors, shades, hues, and would often sit in my living room and meticulously mix over 30 shades of brown from tubes of primary paint that I lied about needing for school. I would mix and swatch and mix and swatch and tell myself that if I could master earth tones, skin tones, and the spectrum of black and grey, I could reward myself one day with color. Try my hand at painting something, or glazing something, or play with colors beyond my makeup and nail polish. Maybe I could use my watercolor pencils instead of just stare at them.

But the reward never came, and for some reason I never felt able to immerse myself in color the way I wanted to, because it felt too good, and too risky, and too fun, and I really just didn't know how to do it without being self conscious. Unfortunately, it really was that serious for me...

               Instead, I ran away from home and stopped mixing shades of brown. Instead, I got a job where the uniform required me to wear all black. I left most of my makeup, and all of my nail polish, and I don't even remember if I took any jewelry at all. I had lost all the color in my life, except for a tin of 48 watercolor pencils from my secret girlfriend, who I was struggling to remember from the grief of everything else in my life. But I could always open the tin, and count the colors, and organize them by shade, and swatch them, and name them, and then gently place them back in their respective trays and tell myself that if I mastered my emotions, got a handle on my health, and stopped being so fucking crazy, I could reward myself with the colored pencils, and finally learn watercolor. Then, I would make something beautiful for the girl that got them for me, if only I could remember if I was mad at her or not, or if she was mad at me or not, or if I had her number.

                My memory was fleeting, fickle, and scary. Everything in my life at that point was, and had been, fleeting, fickle, and scary. So I clung harder to the few things that soothed me, and sincerely debated saving my checks to buy a Pantone book of swatches, and then I remembered I was living off borrowed time and space, in someone else's home, who was kind enough to open it to me when I left, so I shouldn't do that. I would need the money for adult things, not stupid things like colors I had no use for, so I settled for a box of post cards by Pantone, where each card was a swatch of a Pantone color, and I kept the box in my bag and shuffled the cards whenever I was having a panic attack.

                I organized them by color, and shade, and hue, and then I would recategorize them, and quiz myself on the names, and then I started assigning the people in my life to a respective color, scribbling heartfelt notes about why they were that color to me to give them when it was time for me to leave, and never come back.

                I struggled to remember my secret girlfriend, but I knew I wanted her to know that I still loved her, and that the excitement of being able to date her out in the open once I left home had been overshadowed by my grief, and my anger, and that I was a shell of myself anyway, and probably not the person she fell in love with, if that person was ever real at all, and instead of running to her and telling everyone I loved her, I just sobbed into my pillow every night and tried to talk myself out of dying, and tell myself there's no way there's a man or a monster in my closet, if there's even a difference between those two things at all. Instead, I just paced around my new room wondering what my brother was doing, and why he never called, and how many days it had been since I slept, and if anyone else could see the monsters, too. Instead I choked, a lot, on nothing but air or water, and texted the suicide hotline while I was on the phone with the eating disorder hotline, staring at myself and wondering how many days until someone noticed I stopped showering.

And then I would obsess again. The color of my teeth, my gums, my eyes - the shades of everything were suddenly more important to me now than ever. What shade of white are my eyes supposed to be? When is off-white actually not-white? Are my eyes yellowing? Are the whites of my eyes....yellow? Is this jaundice? Do I have jaundice? 

                Nights like that I would call my secret girlfriend, because sometimes she would pick up and facetime me, and I think she used to wear something purple at night. Or maybe red. But her walls were white, with music notes on it, and I would stare at her, sitting in her bedroom of colors, and wonder if she would ever accept a watercolor from me, or if maybe I had made things too hard already. I tried not to imagine her really loving watercolor pictures, because it made me sad that the one time I let myself use the pencils, I sucked at it. It was a hideous trial that ended in banishment, and I never let those pencils see a page again.

                The book I'm reading is actually almost 8 years old now. I never read it. Mainly because I didn't feel like I deserved it, and I wasn't in a beautiful, colorful phase of life like I wanted to be when I read it. I haven't really gotten there yet, hence why it has taken me so long to pick it up at all.

                 It was a gift from a very mysterious, talented, and alluring friend who respected me, and that felt better than her liking me, which I sometimes wasn't positive on. She was never mean, rude, or bad to me. She was always kind, generous, and listening. But she was very focused, poised, and busy, and she always seemed like she had something better to do, so I always felt happy she was choosing to talk to me instead; and she gave me this book as a going away gift, as an ode to my obsessions and ramblings on art and color and form, and since she respected me, and my work, she gifted it to me and never spoke to me again. Not because we fell out, or because she didn't like me (which I still sometimes wonder), but because she was a year older, and focused, and poised, and very very busy, and she probably had better things to do at a very fancy college.

                 She was my first subscriber to my Substack when I posted about it on Instagram, 8 years after she gave me that book. She didn't reach out to me, or comment; she just subscribed, and reminded me that whether or not she liked me didn't fucking matter, because she respected me, and she respected my work, and that was better. So I picked the book back up because I respect myself, and the person I was when colors were my way of coping, controlling, and connecting with my secret girlfriend while my mind struggled to remember her. I would end up leaving Florida, and my secret girlfriend, carrying a tin of 48 watercolor pencils to rearrange whenever I missed her and didn't remember what had gone missing in my life.

                 Now she is asleep next to me while I read The Secret Lives of Color and try to write about what it means to me to even allow myself to read it. Now I'm scrambling to find a new color to give them, as my secret girlfriend has completely transformed into a different person, equally as vivid and vibrant, significantly less of a woman, and infinitely more colorful. Everything is more colorful now, and I'm less than a hundred pages in to the book, less than 5 years reconnected to my partner, and less than a decade out from everything in my life being drained of its color. I hope that soon I'll wear less black and start painting my nails again.