“A Pause That Refreshes” / I Am Alise
When I was 4 years old, I really wanted my name to be Alise. Not Alice. Alise. (Pronounced Elyse or Aleece or however else one would spell it.) I made people call me Alise. I “signed my papers” (i.e. the pretend homework I gave myself…nerd alert) Alise. I have no clue how I decided on Alise, but for a brief shining moment, I was Alise.
Who was Alise supposed to be? I guess that in my young brain, she was someone a little older (probably with lots of fun homework) and sophisticated. A big kid. I sure wish I could conjure some long-lost memory about the genesis of Alise. But it’s not as if this trying-on of personas requires a name change — pretend or otherwise. We do it all the time, consciously or not, since we exist as a multiplicity of all sorts of different personalities. It’d be a shame if at 50 I was exactly the same person I was at 20. And we of course know that we’re apt to act differently in the comfort of our homes than how we act in, say, a professional setting.
For this week, though, I can tell you definitively who I am: And that is a woman who just picked up a copy of Elizabeth Strout’s latest at the library. (Woot, woot…it’s my turn!) Right off the bat, she’s doing her seemingly simple writerly thing: “All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others.” True, true. (And I already know she’s going to flesh out this idea in her lovely way … a way that seems so matter-of-fact but will still leave you breathless.)
But sometimes you get a small porthole — an opportunity to see how we might appear. Because this week I rediscovered a scrapbook of sorts featuring me and my brother at ages 4 and 9 months. My grandma oversaw this keep-Amy-busy project during a stay with our grandparents while our parents were on a getaway. “Alise” was emblazoned allll over it, so I guess I was firmly in my Alise era during this time. And here she is, above, enjoying a tiny sip of Coke after “helping” her grandpa build a fence.
I’ll be bringing this work hard-play hard Alise energy into my summer, thankyouverymuch.
originally published on instagram