Are you familiar with Lady Lovely Locks?

I begin an inordinate amount of conversations with “Are you familiar with Lady Lovely Locks?”

She’s this magical princess franchise that existed from around 1986-1989, right when my gooey six year old brain was ready to imprint and form its first obsession.

At some point I’m going to have to sit down and write out a whole Thing explaining my relationship to LLL. But, then again, maybe it’s not actually that interesting. My parents indulged me with LLL merchandise in the 80s, which I saved in a box as a teen in the 90s.

There’s a whole bit here to explain how I cut off all contact with my mom in my mid-20s and she held my (dearly important) possessions hostage in an attempt to keep me from escaping. It genuinely hurt my heart to do so, but I told myself to just pretend I’d lost it all in a fire, because losing my treasured mementos was the healthier option than having any contact with my mom again. And then a decade later she actually DID burn the house down!! So I really did lose my sketchbooks and diaries and photos and box of LLL memorabilia in a fire. Ah, well.

Then my dad calls me last year (I’m still in contact with him. Obviously) and he’s like “You’re not going to believe this, but apparently she was keeping your stuff in a storage container and she wants to get rid of it now, because she’s given up on using it as a bargaining chip with you. So, I’ve got like ten boxes of your stuff at my place now.”

For the first time in close to 20 years, I held the objects that encapsulated my childhood and teen years in my hands again. My photographs, my diaries, my sketchbooks, my posters, my comics, my... Lady Lovely Lovely Locks collection.

That would be a satisfying conclusion to my LLL saga, but there’s actually a bit more— but I don’t really have a smooth segue for it? So here it is: when I enrolled in the Intensive Outpatient Program and then the Dialectical Behavior Therapy programs at the hospital last year, I filled up the margins of my workbooks with drawings of LLL and the Pixietails. It was borderline compulsive, my hand was operating on its own recognizance. This extra weird because I do not sketch anymore. I only draw for work or assignments, I never ever doodle for fun or to let my mind wander. Sometimes I try! But my brain freezes up and I can’t picture anything to draw, so I just... don’t.

Something about being in a classroom setting just... unlocked that room in my brain that lets me sketch and scribble without restraint, like back when I’d fill up my high school lecture notes with drawings and drawings and drawings crammed around and over each other. (I got a bunch of those school papers back when I was reunited with my old bedroom stuff, too.) I never drew LLL as a student in school, but going through my classes in the mental health program, she decorated nearly every page of the worksheets they gave us.

Auhg. Honestly, I didn’t mean to write this much. I just... I just write one thought and then I remember something else, so I’ve gotta write that down too, and then I make a connection I hadn’t thought of before, so now THAT’s gotta get transcribed, and next thing you know I’ve gone from adding filler text to a post made to show off my embroidery, to now I’ve gone on this whole THING about having a crazy mom and I’M crazy (but I’m learning how not to be) and somehow this princess doll from the 80s fits in there, too???

Why can’t I just tell the good people that I embroidered the Lovely Lady Locks logo because I thought it would be fun? It’s pretty and silly and makes me feel good to recreate a symbol that meant so much to me as a kid.

Oh no, and NOW I want to make an analogy to how the backside of an embroidery is this big clunky mass of twisted blotches of thread. On the front, you’ve got this neat, tidy illustration painted with colorful threads; it stands on its own as a novel piece of art. But behind it? It’s composed of a thousand messy knots, all haphazard and tangled, MUCH LIKE THE HISTORY BEHIND THE PIECE ITSELF. I could have just showed you the face of the finished product, but it’s the mess behind it that’ll actually leave an impression.

Or, y’know, maybe it won’t! That’s ok, too.

My meditation app is nagging at me to go to bed, and since I’m tryin’ real hard to be less crazy so I don’t force my hypothetical children to abandon me to save themselves and then I burn my house down, I gotta do what it says.

May your locks be lovely,

Erika