i have been listening to clarissa pinkola estes' amazing tape series lately: theater of the imagination. in each tape, she tells a fairy tale and then works her jungian magic on it, taking it apart and showing how each of us live out the story in some way. my latest wake-up call was a repeat listening of the read shoes.
image: moriza via flickr
the story of the red shoes is known well by almost anyone who as a little girl (or boy- no exclusion here) loved ballet. a girl, who is plucked from her feral lonely orphaned life in the woods, enters a new life with a controlling spinster. the old lady finds the girl wearing rags and shoes she has made herself from scraps. the shoes, dyed red with berries, are her particular pride and joy. the lady takes all of her clothes away from her and destroys them, replacing them with pretty civilized and lacy things that a little girl "should" wear.
on a trip to the shoe store, the old lady's limited sight allows the purchase of a pair of bright and shiny red shoes. they are a scandal to wear in the culture the little girl lives in. despite the trouble she gets in for wearing them, she sneaks to put them on again and again. when she meets a man with read hair and a pointed beard, he admires her shoes and taps them on the soles. she begins to dance. and dance and dance. and she can't stop dancing. she manages once or twice to get the shoes off, but when the desire to put them back on is too strong a third time, she cannot stop dancing until an executioner has to be called to cut of her feet.
uplifting story, right? but estes points out that this is most likely the middle of a story where the beginning and end have been lost, which made me feel a bit better.
and regardless, it was her explanation and talk that stuck with me. she references "the handmade life" represented by the red shoes the girl made herself and the loss of this life when the old lady takes the shoes away.
estes asks us to consider how we give our authentic selves away through our choices and what unhealthy choices that cause us to dance at their control result as desires once this loss has been sustained.
i think the question for me is what i have to do to cope with things about my life that feel uncomfortable and not the way i want them. she asks us to consider what we dreamed of doing at the age of ten, which for me was certainly writing based on all the little books i made and wrote in. and how i am i coping with not writing full-time now? with instead organizing and dealing with admin tasks and booking travel and fixing xerox machines and running back and forth and back and forth to get silly tasks done.
i suppose the answer is obvious: i am surviving, but this doesn't feel like the life i dreamed of at 10. but in some ways it is hard to say whether that is always a bad thing. there are things we never knew about at 10 that can be immensely rewarding now. and there is a way out of feeling that we have let ourselves down, which estes is generous enough to share:
sometimes it is necessary to make a choice for a time that means betraying ourselves. sometimes, she says, it is necessary to break your own heart with a love or job or any choice that goes against who you are to break apart the outside of yourself and so you can be driven and propelled to never letting that part of yourself down again. i think this is where i am now, and i thank her for pointing it out.
i have chosen a job that does not suit me as a life-long career. period. but i do know that i am now takign risks and making contacts that i never would have the courage to make if i weren't simply dying to get to the point in my life where i have moved beyond this phase. sometimes limitation is not letting ourselves down, it is accelerating our need to arrive where we have always dreamed we would be.
having a ridiculous job has helped me to contact a company i have always dreamed of working with, confident that the skills i am learning at my current job will make me more of an asset to them than i ever would have been otherwise.
so i guess that just makes me a masochist?
i prefer to think of it as opportunism. if we, as we all are at some point or other, are dumb enough to get into a situation that has us internally running and screaming in the opposite direction internally, then we might as well get something out of it.
i plan to get a solid awareness of how business systems work and how to make them run in a way that makes people happier. it will not be easy. but at least it gives me a purpose beyond xeroxing and groveling.
i say allow whatever crappy situation you find yourself in at the moment to be a catalyst to restructure life in a way that you will never get into this particular mess again.
it has worked reasonably well for me: i no longer go out with people i feel i "should" like as i did in high school. or people i know i wouldn't like if i was at all in my right mind. and i now refuse to take jobs that pay me nothing and give me no freedom to structure my own time.
in fact, after this i don't plan on working for a company per se ever again.
when did you throw away your handmade shoes? why? who told you should? and why did you believe them?
what can you do to get them back? what small thing can you do everyday that will remind you that they are out there waiting?
there are more shoes to be made. don't wait too long. take action to move towards where you want to be every day. and as i have to remind myself, i am the one who chooses to keep going into work every day. and one day i will choose not to.
only i know when i am ready for that. but i am sure it will be sooner rather than later.
keep going! and get clarissa pinkola estes's amazing series to listen to in the car as you rush around. i promise it will make your daily comings and goings less fraught and haggard.
Very inspirational blog. :) When I was 10 I wanted to be a vet. I don't want to be a vet now, but I still adore animals. Although, when I was 10, I was also spending every spare waking second reading and "dreaming" as I called it - which was me working on a story in my head. Soon after, I started to write it down in a notebook. So, perhaps, I am still shooting for that 10-year old's dream. Thank you for the inspiration! I need to work on those shoes!
Posted by: Milda | 26 March 2007 at 16:32