This One's For The (Post-Evangelly) Girls
Stop Telling Us To Let It Go
I ruminate often on the tale of the red shoes told in Women Who Run With the Wolves. It’s about a little orphaned girl who has a rugged but handmade life. She has no family, she forages for her own food, she uses scraps to make herself a crude pair of red shoes that are rough, but hers. She has a sense of pride in what she has built for herself. One day, a gilded carriage pulls up to her and she is offered to live with a wealthy old woman and be taken in as her daughter. Dazzled at the prospect of true family and ease, the little girl thinks, maybe it would be nice to not have to work so hard.
She gets into the carriage, but soon finds that all of her own belongings are burned, including her beloved shoes, replaced with fancier leather shoes that nearly put her in a trance just beholding them. What fine shoes. Who could’ve imagined she would be chosen to wear them! But soon she discovers that these shoes, while beautiful to look at, have a mind of their own, dancing when she does not want to, and possessing her in a way that spins her out of control, literally. The shoes dance her, not the other way around. Worse, she cannot get the shoes off. The situation becomes so dire that she eventually seeks out an executioner, begging him to cut off her feet, since she would rather be crippled than to be chained to a life of being yanked this way and that by something outside of herself.
For women who grew up in an evangelical bubble (or something akin, religiously) we may see ourselves in the naive, soul-hungry young girl who stepped into a gilded carriage for the promise of love and ease. We understand exchanging our independence, skills, and sharp senses for the promise of having deep purpose, worth, and ease, none of which we had to come up with ourselves. We didn’t have to find it for ourselves, we simply had to relinquish ourselves entirely to get it. Some of us (my hand in the air) carry an air of learned helplessness handed to us, disguised as something for our benefit. We were sold a dream without understanding that it was, all along, the trap of incompetence and consequently, dependence. Wrapped up in the glittering paper of all the ways we were told we’d be unearthing the depth of joy we could experience by putting all our chips into being someone’s wife, someone’s mother.
