#49 Do you believe in magic?
March 8th, 2024
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.Good Bones, Maggie Smith
Do you believe in magic?
I think of that very often. Traditionally, magic and the esoteric have been associated with women, to the archetype of a reader, a witch, a mastermind who pulls cards and cards and potions and spells and with them, builds anew. Practicing the dark arts and being involved in the occult had deep consequences for women back then, you know all about that. And yet; I think the real truth of it is that women are visionaries. Women have a boundless imagination.
Why is that?
Like Fariha Róisín so eloquently titled her latest book, survival takes a wild imagination. Our world could be a beautiful place. It has good bones. Women descend from the grips of violence and build something beautiful; women envision a world where there is gentleness, where there is union; they envision a world where our men (where everyone) can feel safe, where they can be held, where they can feel loved. In the end, we desperately need a redefinition of what masculinity means — what it means to embody the positive, beautiful qualities that men have been taught to force, to mold, to shape themselves after at all costs. The ruthlessness of masculinity does not exist in the vision women hold. In this vision, there is only gentleness, care, there is only room to grow.
I’ve come to grips with my ideas about what womanhood is in relation to masculinity in the later part of my twenties (so, basically, right now) and a lot of it centers on this: holding each other. Just holding each other.
The girlhood I was exiled from and the womanhood I entered, albeit with weak ankles, ill-suited for heels, and too curvy to fit low-waist jeans, always included the appearance of boys who turned into teenagers who turned into men, people who were the focus of my affection but remained begrudgingly and insistently out of reach. To feel wanted, to feel chosen, to feel protected, taken care of, treated with kindness. These are all human things to want, to feel we need.
Thinking about my frustrations, how we’re so different when we’re placed in a gender binary, how our world still, although it’s making small steps every day, accounts for us to fit neatly into either of two boxes, I understand now that a lot of acceptance can only come from forgiveness. Forgiving ourselves, forgiving each other. More and more, I think that being a woman is more than fighting to make room for ourselves, to bend and shapeshift and force our way into becoming palatable, into becoming accepted.
I think being a woman is more about the way our brains prioritize community and welfare over leadership or dominance. About how we’re suited to lead exactly because of the way we’ve been part of this world, since the world is the world. About how none of us are truly free until all of us are free and what that means in a world that still fights over what kind of rights are innate to what kind of bodies. (Or whose bodies).
I didn’t come here to share more statistics about all the work we have yet to do or about the world we have yet to build. I came here to tell you that women are visionaries because they were born into a world that has forced them to imagine the possibilities — because the world that has birthed them has not.
Women are irrepressible, unmanageable, transfixing, vexing people. For generations, my household was led by them. I come from a family tree that goes back 3 generations, each in a matriarchal structure; the decision-makers, caretakers, and often providers were all women. Unruly women who ruled with an iron fist, occasionally. From the plains and the suffocating heat in Venezuelan towns to the border city facing the Andes mountains. Women have pursued survival, by any means necessary, for hundreds of years. And, most certainly, they will continue to bloom. There’s something really beautiful about the way women move through the world; about how they continue, day by day, to keep this vision in their mind’s eye, to remain committed to it.
And they do it all without glorifying the struggle or the deep injustice of it. They do not resent each other for it. Most women, I believe, don’t even harbor resentment (they would be right to) — they don’t have time to. Indomitable and certain and powerful, they build entire societies just by design. Can you imagine being such a mystery to humankind?
It makes me think it’s no wonder society has tried to control them, contort them into a shape that doesn’t feel so daunting, so intimidating. People are scared of what it means to see a woman, inhibited. Of their ability to cut through what matters with a knife. Their willingness to exorcise shame out of their bodies. Their defiance to keep dreaming all the time — what would the world look like if we were free? What would it feel like?
And that’s the thing about a day like today — it isn’t only about being born into a woman’s body — it is about knowing how to hold the defiance and the gentleness, the sharpness and the softness, the wild imagination it takes to survive. It isn’t only a woman’s existence. It’s every other gender, every other identity, that feels, in its bones, the need to protect itself from a world that would rather they remain in obscurity, unknown, unaddressed, invisible.
So after all the beauty, all the gore, the shapeshifting, the vision-making, the killing of every previous version of itself, the rebuilding, the praying, the ruthlessness to reinvent and to start anew, I’ll ask you again:
Do you believe in magic?
