Yesterday as I pulled out a piece of furniture as one does while involved in a move, I found a little book that had fallen behind a chest of drawers. It was my dad’s baby book and I was surprised at how sparsely populated with words the thing was, as if my grandma (the guy-father-fellas didn’t seem to get involved in this sort of baby tracking) had been given the project of notating baby’s life and really had very little time or energy to do so. And who can blame her given that the actual birthing and raising of a baby takes every ounce of life/time/energy based on what I’ve observed. (And really, it seems unfair to expect a person to write down all the details of this little newbie as they attempt to help them get on with the living.) Though there was one page of this baby book that held a piece of information I found priceless. The one that tracks the dates a baby begins to move. Top of page: “Baby Creeps” then in beautiful Grandma Spencer cursive: “Dean never learned to creep.”

“Dean never learned to creep.” I’m aware that crawling and creeping were, in the 1920s, the same activity. Yet in today’s parlance, “creep” I think delivers a whole other meaning, conjuring up thoughts beyond the physical stage around when a baby crawls on their hands and knees as a primer for standing and walking. My mind went to the M-W verb version: 2 b) to go timidly or cautiously so as to escape notice and c) to enter or advance gradually so as to be almost unnoticed; with a scoop of noun on top: 5: an unpleasant or obnoxious person.

Indeed, my dad seemed far from a creeper in any of those contexts although 5 b) in the verb category: “to change shape permanently from prolonged stress or exposure to high temperatures” seems to speak to me of just what happens in life to everyone. The creep of time. But where that line took me in the way of my dad’s personality was where I landed. He was not a creeper around the edges of a situation. He was not in any way invisible in a crowd but was also not overly loud while inside one. He enjoyed other humans, could tell a joke, tip a glass in a room full of people, hold attention, but never seemed to be angling to be the center of it. He took up space but also could inhabit the edges while letting others be more visible. Would ask questions that I realize now often deflected attention from himself. Boy, do I recognize that move. Apparently learned at the knee of. I’ve no doubt that during his alone-time, he would circle, perchance creep, around thoughts and feelings that were his alone. Because we all do that, don’t we? This carcass (the “living, material, or physical body” of it) carries our secrets and dreams along with the mundane white noise–stuff of day to day.

I think about the ways I’ve crept (&continue to creep) around inside my life, sometimes feeling as if I’m staring up from below level, watching myself interact with this&that. Specifically, I’m remembering how my entire music biz career seemed to be calculating the ways I could creep in and out of a moment with an eye toward feeling out the situation’s safety. The act of journalism was a just-right place for me to apply that creep around the edges. It was the point of the job. To observe, to take note, to be objective. So, sure, that last point was rarely achieved, but the first two gave me what I considered a free pass from having to state my position. A thing that terrified me in that I’d get it wrong, then be cast out into a social wilderness for real, forever. Sure, I can see now how exhausting it was, that constant check to locate intuition around whether something or someone was safe versus the general just-go-for-it expectations of the business.

I’m less exhausted now by a long shot, primarily because the people in my life are ones I dearly want to be there so I don’t have to crouch low while deciding who I need to be in their presence. That’s not to say I don’t still come up against the occasional work project that exudes a vicious vibe that makes me want to exit immediately, but it helps to remember that even though I’m in the tent, the thing is not my circus—I’m a temporary visitor under its big top. I will step out the door on two feet when the thing is done, no need to creep.

But back in the day, when I had no perspective on time, career, desires, my actual self, the responsibility to stay low in order not to get emotionally whacked was crucial. A survival thing that not until so many years later have I realized I was constantly working to perfect. Sounds relentlessly dark but there were also many many good times and I did always find a place for solitude so I could set down the mask and settle into myself, even if that self was a kind of Cubist rendition of me. I recently had a conversation with a friend from that time whom I hadn’t seen in years&years&years. She described the first time she’d met me at a bar during a birthday celebration in NYC back in 1997. It was the day the SPIN court decision had come down against Bob Guccione Jr., my ex-boss at who’s trial I’d testified for the prosecution. The picture my friend painted of me was one I don’t remember being. I do remember being the girl with the long red hair wearing all black, but the woman talking about the case with certainty and confidence and a belief that all women deserved respect in the workplace and world? Her I don’t remember so much.

I was struggling at the intersection between what I thought I needed to be to work as a journalist in the music industry and the peace, quiet, spine-up-straight honesty I craved as a human being. At the time of meeting this friend, I was uncurling a bit given I’d just left the music industry and felt much more freedom about calling things as I saw them. I wasn’t shouting from the rafters though. Nor was I that much closer to honestly knowing what I needed emotionally in order to be whole. I still had years of hiding behind others before I’d get an inkling of how to proceed with setting my own boundaries and desires. But baby steps were happening for sure.

I still creep around the edges of my desires before plunging into them, though now, when emotionally surfing, I do it with an abiding trust that I’ll be held up. I know my people more fully now. I know myself better too. My dad taught me to observe and also, subtly without me realizing it, to appreciate what it means to creep inside oneself to find solitude when the crowd becomes too loud.