I don’t like categorisation. Not really. People and personalities are far too fluid, really, to fit into anything as restrictive as a single word. At an emotional level, it rubs me up the wrong way.
This having been said, and depsite my tendency for chaos, there is something quite satisfying about being able to give something a definitive label. Something quite tidy and neat. Mentally, that is what I want from life. To be able to organise everything precisely. Even if, emotionally, I dread the thought of anyone ever doing that to me.
It happened with this website. I wanted to include all the creative people that I love and admire. But sometimes it wasn’t as simple as putting them into one of the four categories that I was promoting. Just like I don’t feel I would fit into just one of four, many of my friends and colleagues spread across multiple creative fields.
Regardless, I tried. And I’m going to try and do the same thing with my blog posts.
The Phoenix
I’ve long touted the tagline – “actor • artist • author • musician”. It more or less covers what I do, even if it isn’t entirely accurate. And then, a few years back, I got my first tattoo. A phoenix on my upper left arm. It was, in a way, a cliché celebration of starting over. But I think it was also a celebration of passion. In a way – a celebration of my acting – transformation, energy. You get the gist.
It occurred to me a little way down the line that I ultimately wanted four tattoos. One for each of the famous classical elements – fire, water, earth, and air. One on each limb. One for each skill. Each representing a different aspect of my personality – or maybe more precisely, an element of personality that I would need to be the person I wanted to be.
A “Heated Game of Sausage Dogs”
This morning I was on Little Lion duty before heading off to work just after lunch. I was keen to spend some time with her as I’ve been feeling like a bit of a bad dad lately. I was adamant I would play with her and be engaging as I could. This is something I struggle with at the moment because I’ve lost some semblance of my childish playfulness. Something I’m keen to recapture.
Anyway. Most of our morning was pleasant enough. There are always some irritations of trying to communicate with a toddler (in one instance, I’m certain she was trying to gaslight me – she argued that not only had she not just had breakfast (which I had just eaten with her) but also that she wasn’t currently eating the rice cake that I was literally watching her eat), but it all came to something of a head with a game of Sausage Dogs.
To keep it brief – Sausage Dogs is a kid’s card game in which you spin a pointer which lands on a number, the player then turns over a card that has that number of doggy footprints on it, and that contains the body part of your sausage dog, usually making the dog longer – until you find the sausage dog’s tail, at which point the game is over. It’s pretty basic. But, it does require some rudimentary counting skills.
Now… Lily can count, I would say, fairly comfortably to 20. Yet during this game, she seems to go a little off piste. And it seems my annoyance was apparent to my wife who was upstairs working.
Earth
Back in 2022 I got something of an impromptu tattoo on my right wrist – a flower for my little girl. Now it seems clear now that this was the start of my “Earth” element tattoo (I intend for it later to become a larger sleeve, I think) but I was thinking today about my daughter, about what it takes to make art, about what the element of earth should represent in terms of a quality I need to succeed as an artist, as a father, and as a human.
Patience is key. It’s not something I feel I have a huge problem with, but becoming a dad has certainly made me question that more.
And that sat on my thoughts for the rest of the day, as I manoeuvred through traffic, dealt with people at work and considered my relationships. My daughter is always teaching me something – and perhaps today it is that I need to consider my own patience.