Lost Object Claim № 00311: Radiance

Item description:

Article or kind of material lost: my radiance & positivity – confidence, fearlessness in being vulnerable

Color: Orange-yellow like pollen :)

Size: The sun

Approx. date lost: March 19, 2024

Location: Minneapolis, MN

Here is what claimant № 00311 had to say:

Regret mixed into confusion. Lost my sense of belonging & ability to welcome warmth. Sense of hostility, frustration has overwhelmed me. I do not belong.

I want to protect others from myself. But I also want to find myself again.

Dear claimant, you might have been fearless about being vulnerable in the past, and I can understand why you would want to claim your lost capacity to radiate positivity without fear of falling — without fear of the hurt that you must feel now.

I want to be able to write something that gives you that sense of belonging, that ties you to this great interconnected web of humanity and tells you that hey, I read your Lost Object Claim and hey, I feel this too. You belong because you’re here, I’m here, and the present is not forever but it is now.

But I’m totally unaware of what prompted you to lose your radiance and positivity, pollen yellow like the sun, so I’m afraid that anything I write could be so far off the mark it would push you into feeling more alone.

So instead, allow me to submit here some pieces of art that radiate warmth and confidence. Maybe you can soak it in and draw that feeling to you.

Lost Object Claim № 00150: Sunglasses

Item description:

Article or kind of material lost: Sunglasses

Color: Black

Size: Sunglass size

Approx. date lost: Feb ‘24

Location: Madrid, Spain

Here is what claimant № 00150 had to say:

“I stole them from a guy I met on Tinder last year”

Concise.

Everything about this claim, № 00150, is almost too perfectly nonchalant. Your reference to “a guy you met on Tinder” is written to minimize your attachment to this object by associating it with an anonymous face in a sea of swipes. The spare words, at times laced with a tinge of sarcasm (“Sunglass size”) — it’s as if you took a deep sigh, picked up a pencil, and filled in this Lost Object Claim with as much ennui as one could possibly have while voluntarily and intentionally engaging in a participatory art project (there is side-eye implied in my tone here).

Sorry — but I’m not buying it, claimant.

You had some attachment to these sunglasses, or you would not be putting a claim out into the world to find them. So why hide it? Why cover it with this emotional distance, does it make you feel cooler, or is it because you don’t feel like these sunglasses should be *worthy* of claiming? You are still thinking about them, several months later (this claim was submitted in May) — and you cared enough to pack them with you when you went to Europe.

It’s okay to feel attachment to even fleeting connections. Every person we meet is a nervous system we hook ourselves to, be it for a passing moment or decades. Objects can imbue themselves with meaning beyond their function — especially when they connect us tenuously to a version of ourselves from a particular moment in time, or from a particular connection.

I also would be remiss if I did not point out that this Lost Object is really twice lost. Lost first by the Tinder guy when you stole them, № 00150, and then by you yourself. I find myself imagining the sunglasses having fallen between the slats of a bench in a Metro station in Madrid, or picked up by a server on a particularly bright day after they were left in their restaurant’s lost and found for several weeks. Have they had another connection, another claimant?

Well you did not give the universe much to go on, № 00150, in terms of locating these “black, sunglass-size” sunglasses. But I hope this process helped you remember something you felt a fondness for, once upon a time.

Size: 5 foot nothing

Approx. Date lost: the last time I posted… in April 2024

Location: Minneapolis, MN

I dropped the thread with this project for no good reason. I love your submissions, I love reading them, and thinking about them, and putting them into the universe to be claimed.

Life happened, I wandered around, got a bit lost, and now I’m found. I’ll be posting Lost Object Claims this week and ongoing, if you’re still open to receiving them.

Hi [sheepish wave].

I love this project, and for a few weeks, I’ve just been unable to work on it. My motivation has been pretty low, overall. But I’ve also been very excited to write this one and sometimes our own excitement can feel like too much of a demand.

So without further ado, here is № 00112: Roll of T-Max 400 film

Item description:

Article or kind of material lost: Roll of T-Max 400 film

Color: B+W

Size: 1” cylinder x 2½” tall

Approx. date lost: 1988

Location: Boston – Montreal

Here is what claimant № 00112 had to say:

“Somewhere in the Fall of 1988 I lost a roll of B+W 35mm Film containing photo’s of one of the last standing Elevated Orange Line train stations in Boston’s South End. I think Northampton + Dover. I really want to see those photos + what I took. → Photo’s Have Become Better + Better every year in my mind.”

I used to shoot Kodak’s T-Max 400 film, too. In high school and college, hiding behind a camera lens, looking for a different view.

It made me feel like a “real” photographer, using the professional film.

So if I close my eyes I can imagine claimant № 00112, and I have no idea if you are a professional or were like me — trying to find your place in a space by capturing it on film and making it your own.

But there’s something about lost film. It never was developed; the images never became real. They are suspended somewhere in between captured light and a visual story, exposed but unfinished.

When was the last time you shot on film and got pictures developed? For me, I think it was somewhere around 2005 or 2006.

I do have one recommendation for our claimant. There is a favorite instagram account of mine, The Museum of Lost Memories. They find old photographs, Super 8 home movies, slides, and albums in thrift stores and post them online with clues to help identify and return them to their owners. Followers join in on becoming photographic sleuths to try and return these lost memories to their rightful place.

Even if your roll of film with images that get better and better with time is not ever found by the Museum of Lost Memories, you can be a small part of doing for others what may not happen for yourself.

I usually release lost objects into the world on Mondays, but this week has been extra busy, and Monday evening I had to go get my breast MRI screening, which I have annually in addition to a mammogram due to my high risk status as a carrier of the BRCA-2 gene mutation.

And I was thinking of № 00136, as I was lying face down with my breasts dangling in a hole and an IV in my arm and giant magnets banged and clanged around me.

Item description:

Article or kind of material lost: My breasts

Color: caucasian

Size: 34B

Approx. date lost: 15 February 201(?)

Location: Phoenix, Arizona

Here is what claimant № 00136 had to say:

“Cancer in both breasts at age 44. mary oliver helped me make sense of it all.”

When I found out I had the BRCA gene, which significantly increases your risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer, I was immediately put into a pipeline of protocols that have been developed over the last decades to prevent cancer before it starts. I was given pamphlets on bilateral mastectomies, which I could elect to do now, to reduce my risk to near 0. I was also told that I should get my ovaries removed after 40.

I spent a lot of time researching mastectomies, the different options for reconstruction, going on online forums for BRCA “pre-vivors” and looking at mastectomy tattoos on Instagram.

Ultimately, I decided to take a cautious but conservative approach and am opting for “surveillance”, ie, scans every 6 months. The surgeon kind of looked at me askance, like, you risk your life over losing your boobs?

I share this because I have thought deeply, dear claimant, about what it means to lose that part of you.

And I am glad that you’re here. Usually I focus on the lost object in order to reclaim it, either corporeally or intangibly, and we can do that here. But also, I’m happy that we have science, that you are alive, thanks to yeeting those teats (sorry).

I’m sitting here trying to write a transition between “yeeting teats” and esteemed contemporary poet Mary Oliver, and I’m giving up. There is no transition.

Learning I have BRCA at 34 gave me my first understanding (of many more to be sure) that no matter what we do, our bodies can change in ways that we do not want or like.

There was freedom in this. There is pressure in this world to keep your body to a narrow set of expectations, and self-blame (even if just unconscious) can infect us with a fear that if we don’t maintain ourselves — our shape, our skin, our hair — it could lead to irreversible damage.

But thinking about a mastectomy taught me that no matter what we do, shit happens and our bodies can change and you know what? You should just get that tattoo you want. You should claim the space in your body that you want without fear.

So that brings me to Mary Oliver, the source of claimant No. 00136’s grounding. I tried to think about if there were any poems, in particular, that you may have turned to to make sense of this loss. I don’t know if this one was one of them, but for me, it called to mind this same feeling of marveling in the different ways that a body can be in the world, and the way that beauty manifests.

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

– Mary Oliver 

Today we have a twofer: a pair of claims for motivation, ambition and energy. №s 00031 and 00012 hail from different parts of the country, with a different timeline, but both feel the distinct loss of that drive to move ever forward.

Item description:

Article or kind of material lost: Motivation at work / Ambition and energy

Color: Bright / Sky Blue

Size: Pretty big / Variable dependent on the day

Approx. date lost: 2022 / Early months of 2020

Location: New Jersey and my brain / Somewhere on the northside of Minneapolis. Possibly in my home.

Here is what claimant № 00031 had to say:

“I work in a field where ‘passion’ is assumed to be an overriding aspect of my mandate — it’s been gone for a while and transferred to a lot of non-work aspects of my life. I don’t necessarily think I need it back, but I do miss it.”

Similarly, here is what claimant № 00012 had to say:

“I miss my energy and drive to spend more time in my studio. Now I routinely [or maybe actively] schedule time to be in my studio.”

We (in our culture shaped by capitalism and white supremacy) tend to think of ambition and drive as personality traits — there are ambitious people and unambitious people. The ambitious ones are successful, so the story goes, and the unmotivated have only themselves to blame.

“Lazy” is an epithet we are trained to avoid.

Motivation, ambition and energy are more than just celebrated personality traits, though — they are states of being that wax and wane in all of us, much more of a thermometer than an off/on switch. But anecdotally I’ve been hearing from many friends and acquaintances that are feeling the overall trend line of their motivation heading steeply downwards.

That drive can feel like the wind at our backs, making everything easier. Without it, we’re grinding on against the forces imploring us to stop.

One of my favorite paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art is The Poet with the Birds, by Marc Chagall. I think I’m drawn to it because of the colors, the relatively simplistic rendering of the figure, compared to the detail taken with the individual leaves and blooms on the trees.

Is the poet being lazy, unproductive, not bent over his writing desk? Or is he motivated to watch the birds?

Sometimes finding lost motivation lies not in self-judgment or seeking to find the energy we once had for something (a job, a creative practice, relationships, exercise) but in switching your lens to pay attention to where your energy naturally feels like it should be going right now. Sometimes you can’t just switch your focus, and sometimes those things that you don’t have motivation for are necessary to do anyway. But I have found that often energy begets energy, and when you can shift your attention to another place, it can give you motivation for other things, as well.

It seems remarkable, but finally, we have an actual lost object on Something Lost.

Claim № 00032 is for a small suitcase on wheels.

Item description:

Article or kind of material lost: Small suitcase on wheels

Color: Blue

Size: 3 x 2 x 2

Approx. date lost: 07/08/2022 (unsure if that’s July 8th as we’d write it in the states or August 7th)

Location: Birmingham…

Read more

Article or kind of material lost: The winters of my childhood – the cold, the snow, the glee, the sledding, the hot cocoa, the breathless anticipation of a snow day.

Color: Winter white - sometimes pristine, sometimes grungy with debris

Size: 13 seasons

Approx. date lost: 2005

Location: (multiple) Southern Minnesota, The North Shore, The Twin Cities

Every time I get to the studio these days, I am giddy with excitement to open my mailbox and see the Lost Object claims that have come in the mail. Right now this project, this connection with you all, is working powerfully on my brain.

So I’m bringing that energy to claim № 00074, for the winters of my childhood.

Here is what claimant № 00074 had to say:

“Waking up to a snow day, knowing I’d get to go sledding or build a snowman + drink hot cocoa after the cold – that glee that no longer exists, that certainty of cold + snow that no longer exists. No more of both the hope, the boundless possibilities that lay in front of you as a child with an unscheduled day. And truly, especially this year, physically no more winter – no snow, cold or certainty of seasonal timing.”

I’ll be honest with you, claimant – I was born in January 1982 in Chicago, a winter so snowy and cold that my parents were afraid of being able to get to the hospital less than a mile away. Maybe that, plus the absolute BUMMER of having a January birthday in the midwest, contributed to my lifelong winter Scrooge-ishness. But, nevertheless, after high school I moved to MINNESOTA, of all places, so I have come to a grudging acceptance of some of winter’s charms.

My school district also, famously, NEVER called a snow day. I don’t think I ever remember having one. But I think what is interesting about your lost object is that the feeling you are missing is that very rare experience of autonomy without responsibility.

A snow day represents freedom – an unexpected reprieve from the structure that dictates a child’s day – but without any responsibilities of adulthood. Once you layer on the sense of wonder that comes from a freshly snow-covered world, it’s understandably magical for a child.

Of course, we are both here in Minnesota, where it may officially be the warmest winter in history, breaking a record held since 1878. And it doesn’t seem like a big leap to assume that we will only continue to see winter warmer and shorter as climate change continues to escalate.

There’s a sweet sentimentality in this nostalgia for things past, but also a tinge of fear – as Joni sang, “We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came, and go ‘round and ‘round and ‘round in the circle game”. We keep moving forward, further and further away from those winters of childhood, and yet we also move in a circle, always returning to a season that reminds us of something we’ve left behind.

Today on Something Lost we have № 00060, looking to claim the lost possibility for their child to be independent.

A heads up, I’ll be discussing ambiguous loss and grief in parenthood, and mental illness.

This submission is very close to my heart, because I have a similar situation with my child. Lost Object № 00060 is the “possibility for my son to be independent”.

On the back of the claim tag there is a little more information on the lost item:

It reads, “We lost his independence and future plans when he was hospitalized last year with severe mental illness.”

My dear claimant — there is so much in these few words, and while I don’t know the particulars of your situation, I do know the grief of losing the parenthood you thought you would have, and the life for your children you envisioned.

Because of this, I am honored to receive this claim ticket. It takes powerful vulnerability (not a contradiction in terms, because it takes strength to be open and vulnerable in our society) to put this out in the world and try to claim it.

This project is about trying to collectively find what we’ve lost. But I don’t want to minimize this claim with some pat words about finding hope. So I’m acknowledging that sometimes, we need to sit in a loss and just have it witnessed.

I have been interested in the work of renowned Minnesota psychologist Dr. Pauline Boss, who coined the term “ambiguous loss”. Ambiguous loss differs from traditional loss and grief in that instead of mourning and experiencing a concrete loss such as a death, ambiguous loss is more unresolved and more isolating in its experience. It causes profound, ongoing stress and disruption to family systems. But she also writes about ways to build resiliency in the face of ambiguous loss, with six guidelines:

• Finding Meaning

• Adjusting Mastery

• Reconstructing Identity

• Normalizing Ambivalence

• Revising Attachment

• Discovering New Hope

Having a child with severe mental illness means a thousand losses big and small — like when school picture day rolls around, but your child cannot attend school. Or when you look at families out and about, and it seems so easy for them, but your child can’t leave the house. When you cannot leave them alone because it is unsafe. When you cannot meet your own needs, or the needs of your other children (these are all of my own experiences, claimant - your mileage may vary).

I think it’s important to acknowledge this as the grief and loss that it is. It’s a grief that can overwhelm, and speaking for myself personally, feels like a physical sensation of tightness in my chest that takes my breath away.

In those moments, when the pain and stress and the sense that you can’t possibly continue on as things are threaten to overwhelm you and pull you under, the only thing that I have found that brings peace is radical acceptance.

Radical acceptance doesn’t mean that we feel better or okay about our circumstances or loss. It just means that we acknowledge everything we’re feeling, recognizing that whatever is happening in this moment IS HAPPENING. In this moment, we can’t control it, or change it, we can’t second-guess ourselves, or our loved ones — what is just is.

It’s a practice, and not something you achieve and then you’ve reached enlightenment. It’s ongoing, hard work.

In a way, this whole Something Lost Project is a form of my radical acceptance practice. Right now, these things are lost. Let’s acknowledge them. Let’s not feel alone in them. Let’s see what is.

Welcome to Friday Found! An opportunity to connect as a community and help each other find what we’re looking for.

This week’s Lost Object was № 00065, about losing your full-time job.

Well, The Clash had a very particular orientation towards the role of work in our lives, but really, it means something different to all of us.

What role does a paying job play in your life, if any? Source of identity, bane of your existence, a passion, or just what you do to get by? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Today on Something Lost we have № 00065, looking to claim their lost job.

According to the internet and people that Know Things, unemployment is currently low. This is particularly true in Minnesota, where our claimant hails from, where the unemployment rate was just over 2.5% in December 2023.

But lost in those figures and successes are the individual stories of loss.

№ 00065 also shared this about their lost object claim:

What strikes me about what you have to say about your lost job is that “money” is just one small piece of a flurry of associations that you have with your lost job. And that got me thinking about what jobs provide for us:

Motivation. Feedback. Routine. Balance. Culture. Enthusiasm. Routine. Money. Snacks.

And Connection. It’s written here three times, in three colors.

Connection, connection, connection.

What does it mean to rely on our jobs for connection? We do spend most of our waking hours at our jobs, meaning that if you do not (for whatever reason, no judgement or criticism implied) cultivate connection outside of work, it’s going to be a lot of our emotional eggs in that basket.

I think this also fluctuates greatly depending on the phase of life you are in, what (unpaid) caregiving responsibilities you do or do not carry, whether you work from home or remotely and a million other factors.

But to claim your lost job, maybe look closely at those things which you associate and miss about your lost object. I see many things on your list that can be found not just in a new job, but maybe can be resourced in other ways, too. As you seek to find what you’ve lost, how can you not put all your eggs into the “job” basket? What other ways can you find connection, motivation, routine, and SNACKS?

Snacks are important.

Thank you for submitting your Lost Object claim.

Welcome to Friday Found! An opportunity to connect as a community and help each other find what we’re looking for.

This week’s Lost Object was № 00044, about lost optimism and feeling of hope for the future since the pandemic. A couple of you messaged me about how relatable it was.

How do you find hope? Are there specific places, pieces of art, human beings, organizations, or practices that help you?

Today on Something Lost, our first returned claim ticket. It’s № 00044, looking to claim their sense of hope and excitement for the future.

This is a deeply relatable claim to submit. Many of us might have lost our own sense of optimism right around the same time, March 2020, which for the sake of posterity or for anyone mercifully suffering from amnesia was the start of the covid-19 pandemic. I have seen similar claims for lost optimism before, some dating back a few years earlier to the start of the Trump administration. But there is no denying that it has been a tough decade for hope.

№ 000444 also shared this about their lost object claim:

Dear friend — I so empathize with your desire to reclaim a feeling from before everything changed. I have been in that situation as well. I have desperately wished I could gather up all the things that I know now that I wish I didn’t; the lessons learned from both personal crises and through a series of world events that held a mirror up to all my previously understood notions about how we as humans relate to ourselves and to one another. I have wished I could gather them all up and stuff them back down where they came from and pretend I never saw them.

The metaphor that comes to mind is Pandora’s Box, which in modern idiomatic usage is kind of used as interchangeable with “a can of worms” or basically any catalyst to unintended consequences that can’t easily be undone.

But did you know? When I looked up the actual myth of Pandora to refresh myself, I learned something I didn’t know (or maybe had forgotten).

Zeus left Pandora on Earth and gave her a beautiful, mysterious box with instructions to never, ever open it. But Pandora was only human, and eventually couldn’t keep herself from opening it, and out flew all of humanity’s woes: disease, violence, greed, sadness, death. But unbeknownst to Zeus, Prometheus had hidden something else in the box:

Hope.

The very thing you’ve lost.

So, keep a lookout. I have a feeling that now that you have submitted the claim, you may be able to reach out and find a little bit. It will look different than it did before we opened the box. But it’s there, having been transformed by loss and grief.

Thank you for submitting your lost object claim.

IF FOUND…

I am not sure if this is a specific memory for a certain generation of elder millenials, but I can still remember standing on the football field of my town’s high school at 5 years old, clutching a helium balloon.

At the end of the string was a manila shipping tag, printed with blank lines to fill in my name and address and something to the effect of “If found, please write to me!”. The idea was that we could collect penpals by chance and happenstance, and to see how far our name could travel from our home on currents of air.

Fast forward several decades, and here I am - middle aged mom, artist and letterpress printer, still trying to release some essence of myself and hope for connection in return.

I’ve done several letterpress projects to this end. Combining my loves of ephemera, words, and printing, with my desire to organize, bring people together under common cause, and connect at a very human level.

If you’re reading this, it’s very likely that you have been part of some of those projects. And I’m so grateful! I’m launching my next participatory art project called the Something Lost Project. Part 1980s balloon release, part 1880s lost and found property tags, part our very human need to try and remember those things — an item, a feeling, a person, a place — that we have lost and make them present again by putting them into the universe.

Something Lost is collecting anonymous submissions of something you've lost and wish you could summon back to you. Something Lost is a project of Fontlove Studio.

Imagine you could find what you have lost by submitting a claim form? By putting it out into the universe, documenting it, and somehow holding on to a piece of it? Something Lost explores this idea.

Lost loves, favorite sweaters, long-ago cafes that are now high rise apartment buildings, a beloved band that broke up, a part of you that changed — all these things and more can be submitted for a claim.

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