about this calendar

(written for a Creative Morning challenge about “daring”)

Daring to tear of old habits

In 2010 I started to make a block calendar. It is a typical Dutch thing: a calendar with 365 pages, every day you tear of one page to reveal the next page which always consists of the date and then “something”: a poem, a quote, wisdom, text, drawings, jokes. 

I started to make a calendar because I wanted to make my mom a present. I had little money and thought to gift her a handmade calendar. I gathered all the poems, drawings, stories, etc I had ever made. This filled up my calendar for about 20 percent. I needed MUCH more content. Instead of making it myself I started asking friends, and then acquaintances, and then strangers to send me something to put on my calendar. I printed it out myself, not on boring new paper, but on reused paper. Old faxes, invoices, wrongly printed spreadsheets, business paper with ancient logos. It was beautiful. I thought it such a gem, I printed out more copies so more people could enjoy it. That’s how my calendar started. 

Almost every year I’d make such a calendar. Collected content, printed it out on reused paper. Three years ago I broke. I had made so many calendars by hand and was not enjoying the process anymore. But I was stuck.

I had it in my head it hád to be done in the way it had always been done. Reused paper. Printing it myself. Crunching my teeth and suffering through a living room/ workspace stuffed with block calendar elements and machines. I was stuck. And everything else got stuck.

So I layed myself in bed and cried and slept for about a year. I learned to set boundaries, learned I needed to love myself more – and how to do that. And I learned I had autism. Which made many of my life choices very logical to me, finally. 

My handmade calendar never let me go though. I kept thinking about it. I wanted to make one again, but on new terms. I dared myself to do it again. To use my new skills to make this time around a more pleasant experience. I choose a theme for this calendar to help me keep focussed on my goal: “fijn” which translates to “pleasurable” of “joyous”. 

I asked people to reflect on fijn and sent me their thoughts and stories and drawings. And they did. I found a printer to make the bulk of my calendars and I set a limit to the amount of calendars made by hand (52, made sense). I found a space where I could make these handmade calendars together with passers by, in my city’ central library. 

I dared to stop, take a break, rethink my own very stubbornly made choices. The end result is pretty fine.