Thanks for reading For the Birds! These letters are born of my own artistic vision, but they carry the hope of encouraging you in yours.
Today’s story-letter was written for my paid readers, but I’m sharing the first half in a preview below.
Unless otherwise noted, all quotes come from Transformations, Anne Sexton’s 1971 strange-poetic retelling of classic fairy tales. The unidentified pull quote is a line from “The Gold Key,” also from Transformations.
Friends,
I want to tell you a story—a personal one, but only in shape. It’s a fill-in-the-blank sorta thing. Maybe you’ll spot your own familiar content inside its general form.
It’s not a story about vilification, but it is a story about rescue. Mainstream fairy tales teach us to assume that the two go hand-in-hand, but real life is muddy and nuanced, full of good people sometimes doing bad things, all of us bumping into each other in an endless variation of situations and circumstances. The truth is that context—its presence, its absence—is 99% of what determines who we are to each other at any given moment: ogres or princes, friends or foes; good queens, or evil ones. No person is objectively one or the other.
We are, each of us, only ourselves—this is a story-shape about remembering that truth, and the self-rescue it sometimes requires. It’s a story about sitting with the embarrassment of such obvious words long enough to see what lives on the other side of them: acceptance. (I assume; I’m still trekking there.) It’s a story about trying not to grimace at my needs when they show up conspicuously on the page.
Maybe it’s a story you’ve been needing to hear?
"You always read about it: the plumber with twelve children who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. From toilets to riches. That story. Or the nursemaid, some luscious sweet from Denmark who captures the oldest son's heart. From diapers to Dior. That story. from "Cinderella"
Once upon a time, I had an opportunity. A good one. It promised a variety of positive outcomes for my life, the exact ones, in fact, that I’d been working toward and calling in for some time. “Manifesting,” you might say, if you’re the kind of person who thinks in such terms.
Except alongside this sudden good opportunity, I still had my regular ol’ human needs to contend with, some of which, in response to the anticipation of fortune, grew bigger. And those needs butted heads with what the opportunity asked of me, a singular and direct request: that I set my needs down altogether. Trust the process, the opportunity sang in my ear.
The subtext wasn’t hidden. I was being asked to trust something outside of me more than what lived on the inside, with the promise that such sacrifice would lead to good things.
Friends, I don’t mean to be vague: Yes, a person asked me to trust them. Yes, there were valid reasons why maybe I shouldn’t. Yes, I decided to anyway.
But let me remind you that this story isn’t about a villain because there is no villain. There is only a girl who keeps throwing her hair over the balcony and assuming that, because her heart is open and her intentions are pure, only good things will climb up.
And let me tell you something else right now: There is no dramatic plot twist, and hardly a climax to the story. A climax would mean there’s a peak, something built toward but unparalleled by the pages leading up to it. In the larger context of the story I am telling you, there is only a peak that has lasted for years, decades even: it’s a cliff that goes on for miles and miles. It’s a mesa.
And there’s our main character now, the stand-in for the princess. See her legs dangling over the edge of the couch, inside her tower on the cliff? She is sobbing. She wonders where she is, wonders how to locate her own desire while the world beckon’s for her pelt.
See how royally committed she is to keeping an open mind toward outside encouragements? See how she frets about her own preferences, worrying that, if they grow too strong, they will turn her brain into a closed door?
She does not want to close the door of her brain to the world.
Are you comatose? / Are you undersea?
Back to the plot. For a while, I fought my needs. I whispered platitudes to myself. I let the *natural* consequences unfold, a gross misreading of a word that usually orients me. Look at all this fear, I thought, when my feelings were feeling their loudest. Don’t make a decision from fear, I thought, when my feelings were feeling their most upset. I did not want to make a big deal out of something small.
“As if an enlarged paper clip / could be a piece of sculpture. / (And it could.)”1
Then, one morning, I woke up early, so much earlier than my body normally does, my mind racing. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, pages and pages of long, woven sentences, one braid of golden hair after another. I was desperate to see something about myself and the situation, and I thought maybe I could find it on the page. I could not bear this bravery any longer, this trust, sitting rotten in my stomach. I did not understand why bravery, of all the reasonable ways it might feel (scary! uncertain! a little nauseating!), felt like an avalanche of self-doubt.
When my partner awoke hours later, he found me on the couch, sobbing, year after year, story after story, grief-stricken and unable to see myself. Where is she? Where did she go? How long has she been missing for?
"And I. I too. Quite collected at cocktail parties, meanwhile in my head I'm undergoing open-heart surgery." from "Red Riding Hood"