Laura Wade Shirley’s post on “Running as a Spiritual Practice” has been on my mind a lot this year as I picked up running in preparation for a trip a few years ago. In December of last year, I was invited to sign up for a half marathon, which I did in hopes that by mid-June I would be ready.

I took off for my first training run in early April in the mountains of Leavenworth and returned with a new pain in my shins and right foot. Rather than rest, I upped my mileage again, and again. I was training, I told myself, I had to push through. Even with late-night googling of stress fracture symptoms that seemed to closely resemble the pain I was in, I didn’t want to stop. I had to keep going.

And then I couldn’t.

I knew I had pushed too hard. And I knew I had to stop. In an expensive and painful series of weeks of seeking healing and crying in many waiting rooms and doctor’s offices, I was told that this might be the end of my running career.

There’s something so vulnerable about physical pain. In my time at ������Ƶ, I’ve become well-versed in emotional and spiritual agony. But this was different, it wasn’t something that I could hide. Rather, I had to ask for help to do even the tiniest of tasks that I normally wouldn’t think twice about. It was a gift I was angry to receive.

I realized, though, that thankfully I had not yet created new injuries but had merely started applying pressure to old ones. In my 29 years, I’ve gotten hurt in some significant ways (that I’ve generally ignored) and I’ve adapted to living with these hurts in ways that have allowed me to pass as healed, both to myself and others. But with the increase in pressure through training, the injuries refused to remain hidden and demanded attention.

Everything I had done to prop myself up, to convince myself that I was okay, was no longer working.

I had shaped my body and my life around two ideas: I was frail, in need of protection, and that I could not show this to anyone. My chiropractor looked at me and told me to stop protecting myself. He put me in front of a mirror and showed me that I was caving in on myself, trying to diminish my injuries. The way forward in health was to stand upright and unprotected, no matter how much it hurt. In standing up straight I would have to relinquish my attempts to hide and to protect my heart.

Instead of ignoring my pain and pushing through, it is through attention and devotion to nourishing my weaknesses that a way forward is possible.

Slowly, carefully, intentionally, I’ve had to tend to these old wounds and ask for what they need in order to heal.

I was commanded by a trainer that if I was serious about remaining active throughout my life and about healing, that there was no going back. For the rest of my life I was going to have to work on maintaining my weaknesses so they would not cause injury again. I can blame the shoes I had (and I do) but I also have to reckon with how I pushed past all the signals that something was wrong. I had begun to prize my toughness over my tenderness. I was praising my own destruction by valuing my intensity and strength over my pain and weaknesses.

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Delirious, we stumble over the crest and onto what feels like another planet. There is no other way to describe this first glimpse of The Enchantments than otherworldly. Suffice it to say, there is a reason that I submit myself willingly to such physical and mental agony to be in that place. I have yet to find anywhere like it, and they lay hidden in the very mountains that I am now observing, the same mountains that watched over me as a child in the Leavenworth Valley. I completed my first through-hike in 2016 and have returned every year since. It’s as if I didn’t have a choice. I would beg my sister to never let me do this again while on the punishing ascent of Asgaard and be choosing which month would be best the following year by the time we were in the parking lot waiting for our uncle with melon as a treat for our struggle.

But this year was different.

We hiked mostly in silence. My sister stopped and took in views longer than normal. I was antsy, hiked ahead, waited, and looked around quickly.I just wanted to go home, to be done.

I realized that we were saying goodbye.

We dropped out of the Core Zone and started our descent, expertly navigating the trail and avoiding the accumulated mistakes of past years’ mishaps and wanderings. We plunked ourselves down for our ritual of whiskey, gummy candy, and lightening our pack of remaining snacks before the grueling plunge back to the valley floor.

“Do you want to do this again next year?” she asked in between gummys.
“You know, I’ve been thinking that I’m done,” I replied as I sipped whiskey.

We were ending.

Of course, we told each other we would return again one day, but in our silences, we had come to a mutual understanding that something was different. There are myriad of reasons why this year was the last for a while: the high amount of traffic on the trail, the familiarity of the sights, the absence of mistakes, and therefore, challenges. Personally, too, my mind was no longer challenged in the same way. The past had absolutely been a physical challenge, but also a mental one as I learned to quiet my mind through the 14 hours and get back into my body. I looked forward to this time to reset every year—I needed it. This time, though, I was just present to what was around me.I had come home to my mind.

As I sit now, I realize that I had thought that this meant the mountain had nothing left to teach me. I had learned my lessons, I had passed the test.

But this, now, is the final lesson: To leave, to end, to finish, to say goodbye.

It seems no coincidence that in the same year that I end with The Enchantments I am also ending my time as a student. I am no longer being called back to the mountain in the same way that I am no longer being called back to the red brick building. Or, if it is a calling, I am refusing to go (sorry, John Muir, but I’ll keep listening) because I know how important it is to end now.

In my final month in the building, I had written an essay about endings. I meant to submit it to the blog; it was a eulogy to my time as a student and employee at the school. I wrote about how frantic I had become at the end, trying to prepare for the future after school while missing out on what was in front of me. I was antsy, like I had been in the Enchantments, just wanting to skip to what was next and avoid the pain in front of me. The way forward, as I learned in the mountains, was to slow down and be present to the wonder around me. So then I wrote about how I would see groups of friends together around the old coffee-maker altar (how many times have we fellowshipped there?) and how I would have a jolt of awareness that this would no longer exist in a few months. It was ending. I was leaning into savoring the precious moments I had left.

We all know what happens next: COVID-19. We have all collectively had the breath knocked out of us in our particular griefs that have opened up from this pandemic. I feel speechless and gasping still, all of the words I had wanted to say feel empty and painful. The old essay is full of hope and goodness and poetry. It is not wrong, but it is no longer representative of what this particular ending means to me, to many of us.

So instead, like I do every summer, I return to the mountain which remains steadfast and faithful in a way only nature can right now. If I can summit that mountain in search of beauty despite the pain, I know I can end my time as a student and the plethora of endings and meanings that come with that simple act. And I can say: thank you. Thank you for allowing me to tread on your sacred and fragile terrain so that I may become whole again. Thank you for letting me fall in love with the world and myself again. Thank you for teaching me about my strength. Thank you for allowing me to curse you and stomp on you and still be welcomed into holy places. Thank you for being my prayer when I could no longer pray. In the words of the President of ������Ƶ, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

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In the past year or so I’ve increasingly encountered texts, podcasts, and movies that are challenging the false reality of the fairy tale romance. While this isn’t a new critique, it seems to be almost as ubiquitous as the fairy tales themselves these days; the two are often hand-in-hand now (just watch and you’ll get the idea). I was drawn to the “Disney, Fairy Tales, and Feminist Theory” class because I wanted to think more about popular culture’s role in shaping our beliefs and becoming our reality. How are the stories we tell both speaking to what exists and speaking something into existence? (Plus, any class with movies on the syllabus is my jam.)

My particular focus for the final project was on pop culture’s romanticism of the male caregiver (the new rescuer) archetype through placing women in a role of fragility or harm. Using Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and Snow White for comparison, I examined three contemporary true stories of women in comas to understand how fairy tales have become real life—wondering why these stories continue to be told and what this says about the need for new archetypes in stories of romance.

Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are distinct fairy tales that share the common narrative elements of each woman falling into a deep sleep (at the hands of a wicked woman, whether fairy or stepmother) from which they can only be awakened by a kiss. Of course, they are not left to sleep for eternity but are found by princes (with whom they have had minimal, if any, interaction) who can provide said kiss to awaken them and hustle them off to “happily ever after.” These are two of the foundational fairy tales of the Disney empire and are continually told and retold by Disney itself and wider culture. While thinking about the comatose women in need of rescue in these tales, I was reminded of the stories of three other real-life women that seemed to contain some of these fairy tale elements.

(film), (podcast), and (book) all chronicle the true stories of women who become comatose. I chose these stories because all three women fall asleep but, like our Disney princesses, wake up as well (there’s a whole other category of stories that end in death, i.e. A Walk to Remember, but I was not ready to go there). But these women are not alone: they (like the princesses) awake to a male partner who, in these stories, plays a key role as the protagonist and caregiver while the women are sleeping. Because of these features, all of these stories are love stories in one way or another. Somehow, the fairy tale elements have come to life and, because of this, we are still romanticizing stories that depend on women becoming ill and passive. I am curious about why we proclaim fairy tales as problematic yet still tell stories that place women in a similar predicament.

“We are still romanticizing stories that depend on women becoming ill and passive.”

Examining these stories led me to think about how this might be happening as a response to shifting gender roles within society. With the critique of the Disney princes as problematic, perhaps culture is responding to new ideas of what masculinity means today. It becomes apparent from these stories that the male rescuer in modern times is no longer a prince on a galloping steed but a partner willing to push around a wheelchair and fill out endless paperwork. Ideally, they’ll have some conflicts with the parents in the midst of this as well (rather than battling dragons). The modern romance places men as caretakers who are capable of navigating difficult emotional situations, proving their steadfastness by sleeping in hospital waiting rooms for days. Because of this, a new type of archetype is emerging, one who can provide care and tenderness rather than fulfilling the traditional role of rescuer.

While this movement towards roles that redefine masculinity is important, women are still being placed in roles of passivity as victims of illness so that the new masculine archetype can exist. Perhaps storytellers are not so sure about what to do with damsels in distress, particularly when they have families, are successful, independent, and do not especially need their partner to rescue them. If the romantic genre is to be fulfilled in the way the audience still seems to desire, the woman must be rescued from her condition—so she must play the role of victim. I believe that these stories reveal how much we desire to see fairy tales be our reality even while we critique them. We know that what happened to Sleeping Beauty and Snow White isn’t okay, yet we are still drawn to stories that reflect those narrative elements. We still hope the stories of our childhood have a chance at being our story.

The stories I examined reveal the power of the stories we tell to change the stories we live. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes, “Stories are embedded with instructions which guide us about the complexities of life. Stories enable us to understand the need for and the ways to raise a submerged archetype.” Perhaps that is what is happening with these stories as I see some roles shifting and some staying the same. I can see that a new archetype is emerging for men today that is representative of the changes in perception of masculinity. Yet I am still looking for stories that can do this without making dying women, as Dr. Swanson told me, the “millennial Snow White.” Fairy tales, for better or for worse, can provide a framework for understanding our roles, our conflicts, and our triumphs, and it is up to us to live into that or to tell a new tale.

Resources

A Walk to Remember. Directed by Adam Shankman, 2002. USA: Warner Bros.

Abumrad, Jad & Krulwich, Robert. “Finding Emilie.” Radiolab. Podcast audio. January 24,
2017.

Brain on Fire. Directed by Gerard Barrett, 2016. Canada: Foundation Features.

Cahalan, Susanna. Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. New York: Simon & Schuster
Paperbacks, 2012.

Pinkola Estes, Clarissa. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild
Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995.

Sleeping Beauty. Directed by Clyde Geronimi, 1959. USA: Walt Disney Productions.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Directed by William Cottress, 1937. USA: Walt Disney Productions.

The Big Sick. Directed by Michael Showalter, 2017. USA: Apatow Productions.

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