When I grow up, I want to be a lichen
What do you want to be when you grow up?
A lichen.
Lichens are older than most of life itself. Early symbiosis, the freakish fusing of cells that feast on sunlight, and cells that feast on their environment. Lichens are plants. It says so on Wikipedia. But their composites — algae and fungi — define easy botanical classification. Can two not-plants make a plant? Why does it matter which cerebral box we chose to store lichens within? A lichen is a lichen — itself and wondrous for it.
For me, wrapping concepts into neat cerebral boxes gives them an identity. It is essentialism, a form of reductive thinking that allows me to create hierarchies of importance and meaning and then get on with my day. I humbly suggest that this type of thinking is very common. Otherwise, we’d all be standing around, mouths agape, at patches of green on trees, murmuring to each other — “there’s a whole ecosystem in there, I just can’t wrap my head around it!”
Maybe we wouldn’t — I’ve found that other people aren’t quite as excited about lichens, as I am.
What do you want to be when you grown up?
When I was four years old, I was destined to be a lepidopterist. I had a stick with a net at the end and I chased butterflies in the yard, telling the adults who came near me that this is what I was going to be. A lepidopterist. By the time I was six, I was going to save the trees. The problem with trees though is that they didn’t seem very interesting, so one morning while counting the red lights on the way to school, I changed my mind. A veterinarian. Animals were important, I reasoned to myself. So a veterinarian is what I was going to be.
The problem with animals is that they don’t actually talk. The more I read, the more stories I consumed about girls in far flung places who did brave things during their difficult lives, the more people and all their traumas pressed upon my mind. People were the most important thing. I was a person, everyone I loved was a person, so I was determined to help exotic kinds of persons. Why exotic? Because I was an orientalist. It was an innocent brand of orientalism, full of wonder and curiosity. But my mind was made up, a doctor in Afghanistan was what I was going to be. Maybe I’d get tragically blown up by a road-side bomb at the age of fifty? I day-dreamed about it on lazy school afternoons, idly asking my friends that they were going to be, as I imagined myself arriving at the gates of heaven and feeling really proud of myself about a job well done.
I did a lot of my day-dreaming during Art classes. If one thing was decided, it was that that an artistic life definitely wasn’t for me. “Bethany, you don’t have a single artistic bone in your body!” Mrs. Brown, my art teacher fondly said to me once, finding me perched after school pinning coloured paper to a board in what must have been some kind of mis-aligned design. No. I didn’t. And it didn’t matter at all. Because doctors in Afghanistan don’t need to be artistic, just brave and smart and independent.
Maybe there was a bit of Mrs Brown who really thought you could trace artistic talent to the bones. Something inherent. An eye for straight lines and complimentary colours. Well, eyes can be grown. Or commandeered. I’ve spent hours playing orbital games with the mouse-pointer of other people who have straighter and better-aligned artistic back bones than me. A few pixels over. That’s a terrible font. Can’t you see it? It’s just so ugly — look how squished up all the letters are!
How I became a designer
If you stay for long enough in a foreign country, at some point it all just clicks. I remember the French click — in the kitchen by a plastic tablecloth and a toaster that hated me — suddenly the sentences separated into bits. I knew some of the words. Those that I didn’t know — I could look up.
I don’t remember the click for artistic alignment. But now a website looks like it’s a home for Q Anon conspiracy theorists because the heading is in salmon-red, the kerning is off and some stock image of a flag has been plonked on the right hand side of the page, out of whack with either the IMPACT TEXT or the body prose in some terrible sans-serif script that makes me think of the Ghost-story novels I used to read at After School Care in 1998. Why is that font terrible? Because it’s hard to tell the letters apart. So my brain has to guess at the words. And no-one wants to do brain work when they’re already reading prose that confronts them with something serious, like their personal culpability in maintaining the prison industrial complex. So, I suddenly find myself telling a client, pick a font that’s neat and easy to read. We are creating a web design that is compelling, and professional. Let’s leave that particular shade of salmon-red to the Q Anon conspiracy folks, because their audience is so invested that they’d read every word; they could go right ahead and use comic sans.
Sometimes I wonder what Mrs Brown would say to me now.
So how did I go from a pre-med war-zone heroine, without an artistic bone in her body, to someone who gets paid to shoot and edit film, design web platforms, and write things?
I think I lost faith, in the essence of things.
I used to use concepts like “person”, “God”, “identity” and “significance” to work out what mattered, who I should care about, and what I could do. Now those thought-boxes have become contaminated by my wonder at mycellium networks, which knit entire forests into a single, ancient organism, and empathising, poetic whales have swum through my neat, anthropocentric order of priorities. In sorting and sifting the fragments of conceptual boxes that I used to order myself and my world, I have discovered fibres of narrative whose structural importance I didn’t see before. It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what stories tell stories. These are Donna Haraway’s words, inspired by Marilyn Strathern — a cultural anthropologist who unravelled other-worldly narrative and the foreign realities they construct. It matter what stories tell stories. Stories have, I think, been the active ingredient in my own perceptions of my life and it is through stories that I intend to work out what I should be doing next.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
A lichen. A fusing of the core essences of every possible other way to be. I want to be all things. To be all things however is to be nothing. All life is specialised. Every agenda has to find its own niche. Its kin and neighbours. Its biome. Lichen may be the starting point in my wandering thoughts, but I doubt that they will be the end. Let’s be honest. I’m far too impatient to be a lichen. So I think, instead, that I’d like to be a writer.
