“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be a gypsy.”
“You can’t be a gypsy.”
“You have to be born one.”
As a grown-up, I know that you have to be born a gypsy. I’m not arguing this fact.
What I am arguing is who gets to decide what life we want to live and the qualities it should have, even when we aren’t culturally appropriating. What’s to stop anybody from making a living out of their ideas, or even dreaming?
What I am saying is how easily and quickly both our ideals and our dreams can be diminished by others. How hard can it be to make money dancing in the street, singing our hearts out, telling fortunes, and travelling?
Lots of people do it. Maybe not all three at once, yet they do.
Of course gypsy is a Scottish word derived from Egyptian.
What my inner three-year-old self was most likely attempting to express is that I would like to live an embodied creative life. The creative industries being one of the largest in the UK.
And this is exactly where the cognitive dissonance started. It doesn’t make sense. And no matter how long I thought about it, or how real the world was, or how far the gypsy road took me, it never made sense.
I watched the films, particularly the Disney ones. I saw the girl struggle. I saw princesses flail. I also saw that the handsome prince eventually got it together and figured out what the fuck it was that he had to do, so that the woman in his life could get on with talking to animals, herself, and some very special tree friends. Are you beginning to get the picture?
I once had this fantasy that I would write a modern interpretation of Sleeping Beauty that chronicled my own journey with chronic fatigue and my desperate need for sleep all the time.
I never woke up wanting to be alive, or excited about the day. It was always just something that I was going to have to get through. A regular Cinderella story. And the only Cinderella that I ever met worked in a boxing club.
It’s a fable for sure, and it tells us everything that we need to know about modern female life. Fuck the goddesses and the goddess circles and the bullshit glamour spells built on Indian slave labour and your beautiful silk dress. Where the fuck do you think it all comes from? Your alignment. Your abundance. Your extractive micro-economies built on exploitation that don’t account for science, that don’t account for anything much at all.
Even the cult of the Magdalene rarely addresses that Mary Magdalene was a Palestinian.
These aren’t wellbeing economies or circular economies. These are feel-good economies. Self-soothe-your-way-out-of-this economies. Buy-yourself-a-forest-on-someone-else’s-indigenous-land-and-deny-the-right-for-them-to-have-any-legitimacy-there economies.
Yup. I’m officially done with the delusion you are living in. You either live in right relationship or you don’t. You either honour The Ancestors or you don’t. You either honour the land or you don’t.
There is no middle way. This is the threshold you have to cross. This is the work. There is no cusp. You either cross it or you don’t.
Let’s be clear. To cross that threshold merely makes you aware that there is no other way. That every choice that you make that is not in right relationship is simply offsetting the consequences in the global risk game that we are all playing in. This does not make you woke. You have not initiated. You have only become aware of the threshold and what is actually required. You’re looking for the pamphlet for going to medical school. You did not apply. You have not applied. You have not sat the test. You did not pass the test. You have not been accepted. You have become aware of the threshold between who you are now and who you choose to become next.
Do you see yet? Do you think you are going to figure it out soon? Is this making you uncomfortable? Are you feeling activated? Is your nervous system itching towards unsettled and possibly even twitchy?
Och, that’s cute. I’m glad that you noticed. Can you sit here a wee bit longer and feel into that for me?
What you might be beginning to notice is that I don’t even have to be there, or fully present, for you to feel this. Somatic experiencing doesn’t require you to have a facilitator. It requires you to feel.
That is it.
Oh my fucking God. Do you feel something? Are you feeling something? Are you human? Are we all human? Can somebody please tell me what level of deception we are all working under that any of us think that feeling something is a rarefied fucking skill?
Your rage is legitimate. Whoooooooh. It’s difficult being a woman? It’s not difficult being a woman. It’s difficult being alive. For all living creatures. And wait for it. You are making it worse for most of them.
And you don’t want to hear that. It’s unsettling. Where are you, Icelandic snow ponies, now?
Nope. You don’t want to hear it. Can we scroll a little more until I feel a little better? Incrementally?
Sure you can. The truth will be waiting for you when you get back.
After having attempted to write the Sleeping Beauty story several times, I quite simply gave up. It was just too heavy to explain why the world was so tiresome and exhausting for a girl like me who was so frequently enraged and branded as intense or militant.
And maybe, as the world catches up, you are beginning to realise: no fucking wonder. Anyone with a heart is exhausted.
Gaslighting becomes a word of layered meaning. It speaks of the subtle, ongoing manipulation that can go on in intimate relationships. However, it also speaks to the ongoing manipulation of the fossil fuel industry, starting with the production of gas light and paraffin, that was discovered by James ‘Paraffin’ Young, who just happens to be from Glasgow, funded the foundations of Strathclyde University, lived in my village in Scotland, and financed David Livingstone’s journey through Africa.
Do you see the connections? How one thing led to another, and language leaves breadcrumbs for us to follow? That language can give us structural clues as to what is actually going on. The constellations of meaning. That somehow the microcosm is always representative of the macrocosm, if we all just stop and pay attention. That the manipulation that we feel runs deep within us, through our bodies as feeling, and tells us a story that we have to be willing to witness for ourselves. There are layers of misinformation that inform our whole Western culture. We have names for this growing catalogue of understanding built in ontological denial, fuelled by slow-forming epistemological violence and injustice.
How is it exactly that the world’s two major religions diminish indigenous wisdom and women’s embodied knowing? How is it that we can celebrate and pay for Christmas while Palestinian babies starve, while women in Bethlehem give birth under bombs?
I am a realist.
I am no longer confused by the world’s moral abdication. That the well-meaning handsome prince will turn up and slay the dragon, or even the shadow self on his hero’s journey of return. Nor am I resigned.
I am the Paper Bag Princess, bored of excuses, silent avoidance, and out here slaying dragons herself, if very badly, with a blunt knife.
They shot someone good yesterday. It could have been me.
Recommended Reading List
Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
Arendt, H. (1967) Truth and Politics. New York, NY: Viking Press.
Baldwin, J. (1963) The Fire Next Time. New York, NY: Dial Press.
Bainbridge Cohen, B. (1993) Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering. Northampton, MA: Contact Editions.
Brand, D. (2001) A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada.
Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Carson, A. (1986) Eros the Bittersweet. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Carter, A. (1979) The Bloody Chamber. London: Gollancz.
Estés, C.P. (1992) Women Who Run with the Wolves. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gendlin, E.T. (1981) Focusing. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
Hübl, T. (2020) Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. Louisville, CO: Sounds True.
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. London: Marion Boyars.
Klein, N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Le Guin, U.K. (1973) ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Lorde, A. (1981) The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.
Munsch, R. (1980) The Paper Bag Princess. Toronto: Annick Press.
Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Oreskes, N. and Conway, E.M. (2010) Merchants of Doubt. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press.
Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Scott, J.C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sharpe, C. (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Solnit, R. (2004) Hope in the Dark. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
van der Kolk, B. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score. New York, NY: Viking.
Kimberley K. Stone 