Fiction Genres V: Fairy Tales Journal Assignment 1

Happy First Post, everybody! What a glorious day for the internet. Go buy some balloons or bake some cookies or something!

The summer term kicked off this week and I have two classes: Narrative Journalism, and Fairy Tales. My first journal for the Fairy Tales course seemed a good, memoir-like, get-to-know-the-guy-whose-thoughts-you're-reading kind of thing to use as a first post.

Our assignment was to "Write a flash personal essay or memoir essay in which you bring us into an encounter...with a fairytale." Most of my fairy tale experience was the watered-down, G-rated happy endings Disney supplied my childhood. Not that there's anything wrong with Disney-- but I wanted to hone more in on fairy tales' darker, more realistic roots. Conveniently, for Christmas I received The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales.

The following lyric essay is a comparison of my life to "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was."

Thanks for reading! :)

-A Wadi

Youth Went Forth to Learn…

If ‘Youth’ is me, many words could replace that ellipsis. The Grimms filled it with ‘Fear.’ I relate to their youth who “said to himself, ‘If I could but shudder!’” I relate to his quest for self-identity, purpose, art, and have at times suffered a similar self-perception of living in my older brother Erik’s more intellectually and physically gifted shadow.

The youth is an idiot, according to his brother, father and the narrator. Near the end of the story, the king awards the youth a castle, riches, and marriage to the princess, and the youth responds, “That is all very well, but still I do not know what it is to shudder.” ‘Idiot’ feels apt here, but earlier the boy shows a degree of compassion one might consider insane as he unhangs six corpses from the gallows, sits them by the campfire to get warm, berates them when they let themselves catch fire, then hangs all six where he found them as if the gallows were a time-out zone for tantrums. Insane, perhaps, but then again, the scene may simply show the boy’s naïve conception of death— displayed later in his strength competition with Death incarnate.

“My heart pounds within me; death’s terrors fall upon me.”

“…and looked savagely at him with their fiery eyes… black cats and black dogs with red-hot chains…”

For a long time, I would have envied the youth’s simple-minded courage. If shuddering were truly an art and could earn a living, I could have retired to a private island before middle school. I have a vivid memory of being around eight years old, in the car with my family, riding home from Erik's lacrosse game after sunset. I was facing my dark window to hide streaming tears as I was stuck in obsessive terror over the thought of our deaths.

“Fear and trembling overwhelm me; shuddering sweeps over me.”

“…the devil must have put this into thy head.”

Death was my deepest-rooted fear, but I guess that didn’t feel like enough because I kept branching out. First were typical childhood aversions to darkness, demons, monsters, and an ultra-sensitivity to horror movies. Around 1st grade a Goosebumps episode made me renounce swimming for months because I thought dead swamp people would appear and drown me. Eventually my awkward phase began and my fears involved less monsters, more people. Fears of humiliation, of romantic relationships and, eventually, of trust in general.

Depressive symptoms developed around 7th grade. An outgoing youth became a quiet adolescent who retreated from inner turmoil and outer social anxieties by going forth into fantasy realms of acting, video games, porn, and, when my mind worsened in college, getting high. In 2015, instead of suicide, I went forth into sobriety and faith, then went forth to apply to seminary. Rejection in 2016 felt like I was disowned by God, much like the youth was disowned by his father for being an allegedly irreparable disappointment. I went forth to discern my life purpose in Chicago, but relapsed when hope and faith dwindled. When my trust for others imploded again in 2018, I went forth in solitude to Denver.

“’Ah,’ said the father, ‘I have nothing but unhappiness with thee.

Go out of my sight. I will see thee no more.”

“I say, ‘If only I had wings like a dove that I might fly away and find rest.

Far away would I flee; I would stay in the desert."

These ‘going forths’ involved one desire to find something and one to escape something else. In Denver I again tried to halt my restlessness and pain. The best I could do was numb myself, only to learn numbness has as much an expiration date as life. By late December 2018, my drug-induced numbness was curdled.

It's hard to pinpoint crossroads in retrospect when swaths of my past were spent intoxicated for all waking moments which cascaded and blended like Niagara's mists. Somewhen in there I stopped shuddering from fear of death. Death’s intimidation weakens the more one’s broken mind fantasizes about it. Pain replaced fear as my shuddering's source. The tremendous internal ache of my trashcan brain’s leprosy. The distorted conscience who called that trashcan home and thought the cure was smoke-strangling and bludgeoning it with spiked baseball bats of self-deprecation. I was alive for one reason: fear of breaking my family’s hearts outweighed my self-hatred.

For my final Christmas in active addiction, I was visiting my parents and told Mom I thought God wanted me to kill myself. Two months later, during a surprise visit and intervention from Mom and Dad, I agreed to go forth to depression and addiction treatment in Los Angeles. At first, my willingness was not of hope but of apathy. I figured if treatment didn’t work, I could at least die in my birth state.

“’Not so fast,’ replied the youth, ‘If I am to die, I shall have to have a say in it.”

Much like the boy’s strength competition with Death, my recovery was a competition with my cancerous self, who grew out of my wounded self, whose desperate scrambling to cope with harsh realities suctioned me away from the true and holy self I am meant to be. My recovery's ignition was another going forth to learn. Again, an ellipsis fits here… How to reverse self-inflicted damage, how to hope, how to heal my relationship with God, how to rediscover, forgive and love myself. After years of self-delusion, I went forth to learn truth. Only then would I know rest from my shuddering.

“However difficult it may be, I will learn it, and for this purpose indeed have I journeyed forth.”

“I would soon find a shelter from the raging wind and storm.”

I don’t envy the youth. In fact, I pity him because his courage was born of ignorance. Some might say “innocence,” but he had a bit too much fun slaughtering death’s terrors with a kitchen knife to be called innocent. Even more than the youth, I pity my past self whose fearlessness of death was the consequence of my prayers for it to find me.

Today I’m grateful it didn’t. I regard with love the little true me who shuddered on diving boards. My death and monster phobias, I think, were early recognitions of how wonderful life and goodness are, how bright they shine among the world’s corruption, how their shine is maintained and only hidden—waiting to be rediscovered—when eclipsed by pain in the soul. All the treasure chests of miracles which have blessed my recovery have taught me the key to rediscovery is two-pronged. One has to have faith that shuddering can be learned, that is, that the shine, the true self, God, purpose, art, and whatever else was thought dead still exist. Then one must go forth to learn truth, to learn that truth is Love, and that Love is the greatest shelter of all.

Sources:

Red Text: “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was.” The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, by Jacob Grimm et al., Rock Point Publishing, 2013, pp. 12-18.

Green Text: Psalm 55:5-9. Little Rock Catholic Study Bible. New American Version, Revised Edition. Catherine Upchurch, general editor; Irene Nowell, Old Testament editor; Ronald D. Witherup, New Testament editor, Liturgical Press, 2011.