Art, Inspiration and Paper Arts

 

Things I Learned While Trying to Prove I’m a Real Human Being (Despite a Suspicious Number of Passports)

 I know this is technically a blog about art and paper—and yes, I’m currently on a paper trail that seems to have huge gaps but I’m going to veer off again and talk about the research I’ve been doing on my own life. It’s strange, really. After 26 years as a genealogist, I’m used to digging up century-old documents from dusty archives and church basements… and honestly, they were better at record-keeping than whatever happened when the world went from typewriters to tech. Somehow, my great-great-grandfather’s land deed from 1883 survived—but my employment record from 1987? Gone with the dial-up.

So, here's something nobody mentioned when I was younger: having lived isn't the same as being able to prove you did. Turns out, a whole existence doesn't count unless it comes with paperwork. Stamped and dated.

Now, I have had a very international upbringing. My parents treated the Pacific Ocean like a revolving door, as I have already said. Australia, America, back again, sometimes with stopovers that became entire school years. They said things like, “It’ll be an adventure!” which, translated, means, “We’re going to lose every official document you’ve ever had. Repeatedly.”

I’ve had more passports than ex-boyfriends. And I’m not bragging. Some kids collected baseball cards—I collected international stamps. My maternal grandparents were always somewhere in the world on the African continent with my aunts in tow. So, family visits often included several modes of transport and from the time I was a baby. And I’m missing one passport. Just one! But I have an official letter saying they are looking for it and will let me know it may be several months because that era is in files, not digitized. Again, the gap.

School records? Picture a trail of half-completed transcripts in at least three educational systems, spanning two hemispheres, none of which agree on how to spell my first name because I’m a girl named Jeremy. That is another story. One school blatantly said, “we don’t keep records 25 years or older.” But my photo archive (I was a scrapbooker once) and good friends found enough class photos in school uniform to verify I was there. Very official.

As for work history, good luck. Everyone I worked for in the ‘80s and ‘90s is either deceased, on a new career path or retired. Records? Shredded. Deleted. Or saved on a floppy disk in a filing cabinet on another continent.

Because one day, a Very Serious Person in a windowless room is going to ask, “How do we know you grew up here in Australia?”

And you'll say, “Because I still have the emotional ties and friends I talk to everyday because now we have tech (but I still have all the letters).

And they'll say, “That’s charming. Now give us a photo of you holding a Vegemite sandwich in front of a television showing Humphrey B Bear.”

Which brings me to my sage advice: Take photos. All the photos. Photos of you next to landmarks. With people.  Make the courtroom admissible. Get a selfie with Uluru and the timestamp. Keep every passport, expired or not. And for the love of bureaucracy, if someone offers you a Real ID during a pandemic, say yes.

Honestly, with the number of times I’ve crossed the Pacific, they should’ve just handed me a life jacket and permanent dual citizenship. Instead, I got anxiety and six kinds of luggage.

So yes. I lived. And I have the jet lag, expired passports, and a deeply held belief that the Pacific Ocean is my revolving door to prove it.

 

 

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