We are telling STORIES
My parents always used to tell the story about how when I was three I climbed on the stool next to the stove and watched my mom grill pork chops. I shouted to my dad, “We are having hamburgers with handles on them!” That’s the furthest back I can remember in which I expressed a good metaphor. You have likely already heard me tell the story about the moon, banana, and fingernail (if not, it’s on Tik Tok) and I believe that story is from the same time frame in my history.
My parents were teachers, but also artists. My dad is an amazing writer and he taught Science Fiction and Fantasy when I was in high school. He filled our road trips with Ursula LeGuin and Tolkien. My mom was a potter and later a painter (still is). I feel like it has taken me decades to acknowledge and understand that I have taken the heart of both of their artistry and blended it into my own. I was never really a writer or a painter or a teacher, but a storyteller. Stories have taken shape in all of those genres over the years.
Jane Fonda refers to the last decades of a long life as “the third act.” As I approach this time period I am delighted to have found the part of me that genuinely appreciates who I am. I like me. It’s something many of my friends in their fifties express. There is a freedom in it that is motivating, expansive, deliberate. It is with this enthusiasm and drive that I have really begun to whittle down the essence of how I want to spend my third act and The Pocket Angels are at the heart of it.
These totems continue to grow and evolve and have become more playful, more curious, more in touch with what I want to say about my experience and the world. It delights me to hear from so many therapists who are using them in their practice and I get so excited each time someone DMs me a picture of their pocket angel having an adventure, especially when it is from a place I have never visited myself. I am tracing back my roots to that very first metaphor and quickly realizing that this collection of totems has been actively brewing in me since way back then. They have been with me in the land of make believe, from Mr. Rogers neighborhood to “playing house,” to spending countless hours in my room playing with Fisher Price people). I even spent one summer pretending I was a secretary to doctors and spent my days taking fake calls and writing memos until my friend Melissa’s mom got upset with me and told me that if I was going to spend all summer inside to at least pretend to be the surgeon and not the secretary. I don’t know. The secretary seemed to have better stories.
I invite you to watch The Pocket Angel stories unfold on Instagram and TikTok. A new line of dolls releases every six weeks or so and the next thirty come out on October 1. I am doing a deep dive into what it means to imagine, to manifest with joy and ease, to cope with trauma and tragedy in ways that give hope. At the heart of what I am creating are stories that illustrate what it means to use one’s imagination for good, which given the state of the world, seems particularly important. Come play with me.
Snippets of the Instagram Stories
