As a child I used to creep out of the house into the dark night, long after my parents had gone to bed, and stand in the shadows at the edge of the little swamp that sits across the way from the old house, listening to the frogs calling. I would pretend that I was one of the forest creatures myself. I told myself that if I held very still, and was very quiet, that some misty night, by the light of the moon, I would one day be lucky enough to see a unicorn come to drink from the little pond in the middle of the swamp, and maybe, just maybe, it would see me and come eat the apple that I picked from the old, gnarled, forgotten apple tree a little ways up the road that no one took notice of but me; the strange child who lived at the crossroads of Main and St. Laurent streets.
I never did see that unicorn, and the old apple tree is long since gone, felled to make way for a paved driveway, but the frogs are still there, and somewhere, buried under the debris of adulthood, there is still a shy, fae child lurking in the shadows beneath the trees, hoping that if she’s careful enough, she’ll find her way across to the place beyond the Fields We Know and at last come Home.
Earlier this week, I read a fantastic post by Kelly at Cordelia Calls It Quits, and it got me thinking. That girl up there? She's probably PISSED at me. Actually, I know she's pissed. I can hear her yelling at me if I listen for half a second. She had
Plans for herself, and not a single one of them consisted of sitting in an office all day, locked away from the sun and the wind and the trees, doing meaningless crap that only made someone else rich.
Her biggest plan in those days (aside from riding off on the first unicorn she saw) was to live in a gypsy wagon, travelling the world, and telling stories to people around campfires on warm, summer evenings, while the crickets chirped and the owls called. Granted, she wasn't sure how this was going to work with her desperate terror of crowds, strangers, or public speaking in general (though she did know that she could act on a stage, thanks to her improv drama classes with the best, most wonderful teacher in the world, who she adored and wanted to be JUST like, so maybe it was kind of like the same thing?), but she knew that's what she was going to do.
The funny thing is that, unlike most childhood fantasies, this one never really did go away. It changed it's clothes a few times, but the travelling and collecting stories and pretty/odd/interesting things and sharing them with people has always been at the core.
None of this is done by sitting at a stupid office desk, generating invoices, filing paperwork, or chasing down delinquent clients. Ten-year-old me? Not amused. I keep trying to explain things like rent, student loans, car insurance, etc. to her, but she's having none of it. She completely fails to understand why she should spend her life, the only one she's got, doing things that don't make her happy, simply because Society says so. That argument didn't work when her parents said it to her when they wouldn't let her do something she wanted, and it's still doesn't make any sense to me. "Because I said so" and "That's not how things work" have always felt like cop-out answers. They're the excuses people use to try and convince themselves that they can't do what they really want, and woe betide anyone else call "Shenanigans!" on them for it.
I still need to figure out a way to produce some kind of something that people will pay me for, though, since while 10-year-old me doesn't understand bills and "adult responsibilities" (she did seriously believe in unicorns and faeries and every myth that looked at her with beckoning, mysterious eyes), 35-year-old me does.
This is where I'm still stuck... the whole "how to get paid to wander around and collect stories and shiny things" bit.
I do know I'm getting very tired of my child-self being told, again, that she can't do the things that give her joy. It hurts her, and she got hurt enough by the people around her. I don't want to be on that list. I want to be on the list as my friend, Jasper, who listened to her stories and admired the things she found; Desmond who, in her teenage years, encouraged her in her joy; Ardell, her beloved drama teacher, who taught her that it was okay to be a spirit of the wind, even if it was only for one hour a week...
I just don't know how to give her, yet, the tools to do what she needs to do to grow and thrive in a world that doesn't make much sense to her.
