The Braid Takes Shape
“Do you know how to do a French braid?” a friend asked me the other day.
And the answer is yes, I know how. It starts with knowing a basic braid. Learning how to make a braid is like learning how to tie a shoe: it feels hard the first time, takes concentration the next few times, but before long, no thought is required. Or so I assume; I don’t actually remember learning how to braid. It’s just something I can do, like walking, or snapping my fingers. Writer though I claim to be, I cannot summon the words to clearly explain how it’s done. You just…do it. Left strand over center, right strand over center, repeat. Voila: braid.
When we’re talking braids-as-a-hairstyle, all that makes a French braid special is that, as you pull each strand across the head, you incorporate a bit of hair from side, and a bit more, a bit more, repeated this each time until all the hair is incorporated. The resulting braid lies beautifully flat against the head — or, if you make a slight change in the way your cross the strands, the whole thing stand out clearly, like a ridge running across the scalp.1
It’s so simple, in theory. In practice, though — especially performed one’s own head — things complicate. You have to hold your arms up above your head, your entangled fingers keeping a mental record of your invisible progress. It’s hard to know which hair to grab, and how much of it. You can’t see what you’re doing in the mirror, so you don’t know if you’re doing it right, or if it looks like anything at all.
This awkward sensation of being unable to see what you’re making — if, in fact, you’re making anything at all — can be exasperating. And not just when it comes to hairstyling. In my own life, this exasperation sometimes manifests in a sort of professional angst. For much of my working life, I’ve struggled to sum up what it is that I “do,” and that was never harder than in 2021, when I was a freelancer all year long. But a freelance what? Even on a gig-to-gig basis, talking about each job required an exhausting amount of scene-setting, as a lot of the work was in some kind of new or uncommon, “oh, that’s a job?” niche. I had no way to sum up what it was that I was up to, career-wise.
One of those strange gigs, in the works for a while now, happened this past Thursday and Friday. A friend connected me to a Bay Area independent high school with a special between-semesters curriculum. Students signed up for short courses, the kinds of things that they didn’t get to study during the course of a normal year. I devised and taught two courses, each split over two days. One was about screenwriting and movie structure. The other was about “narrative nonfiction audio storytelling” — in other words, podcasting.
Teaching is always a kind of performance; I thought teenagers might appreciate a little extra razzle-dazzle. So, on day two of the screenwriting course, I opened the class by asking the students to watch me carefully for the next minute. I left the room, then rushed right back in, frazzled2 . “Sorry I’m late!” I emoted. Then I proceeded to ransack my purse, telling them I was looking for my phone. I pretended that I couldn’t find it, and rushed out of the room again.
I re-entered, composed. “And…scene!” Lord only knows what they thought of my performance. I didn’t pause to ask — we pressed ahead to learn how to write the preceding scene in screenplay format.
During the narrative non-fiction class, once we got past the theory talk, and the Ira Glass videos on storytelling, there was a bit of technological nitty-gritty to get into. I opened up GarageBand and explained what a “non-destructive audio editing” was, and how to make new tracks and recordings. If you’d walked into the old Michigan Avenue store on any given Tuesday in the late Aughts, you might have seen me giving a very similar demonstration to a handful of Apple Store customers.
It was just a two-day job. I wasn’t expecting it to be the synthesis of my entire professional life. It had all seemed so random before.
The honors student who dreamed of being an actor. The film studies major whose thesis advisor told her she should go into teaching. The aspiring writer and filmmaker who spent her early-to-mid twenties extemporizing hour-long public workshops about software. The documentarian who started hosting a stand-up open mic. The screenwriting grad student who got bored of her blog and turned it into a podcast. The producers’ assistant who volunteered to teach screenwriting to fifth graders. The podcast producer who turned her stage play into a movie. Right over center. Left over center. Repeat.
If life is a series of choices, if our life stories build with time, chapter upon chapter…well, there’s no real reason why those chapters need to weave together into a recognizable shape, each one in conversation with the others. Still, I want them to. I want to see the ways that I am the sum total of all my experiences.
It’s a tall order and a rare occurrence, these opportunities to see what it is that we’re making with our time on earth. I’ve been working in some capacity since I was 163 and in over two decades, I don’t think I’ve ever had this sensation of professional synthesis before. What about in other areas of my life? Of our world? I guess all I can do is keep a look out.
Because, even if it was just for a moment, it was thrilling to get that peek into the hand-mirror, that brief recognition that my braid did indeed have a shape. It makes it that much easier for me to braid on, with confidence. Right over center, left over center, right over center, left over center…repeat.
P.S. This is my World’s-Best Level dad.
If you’re reading this on the day it’s sent, today is his birthday.
Happy birthday, Dad!
Also known as a “Dutch braid”…for some reason.
drawing easily from my real-life emotional state!
earlier, if you count babysitting…and honestly, there’s a strand of that in here for sure