Undaunted
A letter from the place where the wild things are
Today’s tarot card is the Undaunted.
The Undaunted is a wild animal — a wild thing, rather. Did you read that book, Where the Wild Things Are? I liked it as a kid, but I think I was supposed to like it more than I actually did. My mother liked it a lot. I always found it somewhat… pointless?
Firstly, I was put off by the way Max takes command of the monsters. I mean, he treats them like crap. Certainly he learned it from somewhere; the book starts with the boy being sent to bed without supper as a punishment. Remember when not feeding your children was, like, a cute and normal day-to-day thing you might do, for their own good? Charming.
I never liked Max, and never wanted to be compared to him, but they sure tried. It’s a common strategy of insecure parents who know they’re not doing a good job — cast the child as a spoiled, thoughtless oppressor who lashes the parents as they slave away, every (increasingly tentative) expression of the child’s needs added to a long list of unreasonable, overweening demands that prove the child was born that way.
pompous little tyrant
That’s very important — when your parents feel incompetent, they will try to assert that you were born with the qualities they despise. They certainly didn’t teach you that, no! Never mind that experts say the exact opposite. Children learn by mimicking their parents’ behavior, and parents who emphasize self-reliance and individual success over community and connection, model entitlement and self-absorption by advocating self-sufficiency and individuality in the form of capitalist success… they are spoiled parents, and they raise children who agree with those spoiled perspectives. If preschool-aged Max is a pompous little tyrant, it’s because he learned it in the same place he learned literally everything else — from the pompous little tyrants raising him.
The book also has that very common trope in children’s literature, the “found Fairyland, and self-actualization, and adventure, and friends, and the respect and love of my peers and community, but now I must go home, to the home I was so eager to leave and where I have none of those things, for some fucking reason.”
A ton of kids’ books end this way — did Alice in Wonderland start this nonsense? Or were previous generations so insecure about getting caught reading fiction that they needed every story to end with, “And then she woke up, and it was all a dream, so she could get back to practical things, and so can you!” I hated that. I could never see a single reason these people would want to go back to the normal world, having escaped to another one. And, well… I couldn’t imagine doing that myself. See, it was made very clear to me that escape was never an option.
I threatened to run away as a kid, the way all kids do as soon as they learn it’s a thing. It’s actually a very normal testing of boundaries for a young animal, but I quit it pretty quick, because my mother’s response was always, “If you ever run away, don’t you dare come back.”
The trouble with this — besides the obvious, that it’s a terribly cruel and vicious thing to say to a child, let alone your own child — is that it leaves the child with a lot of unanswered questions, questions that create cracks in their sense of security and trust in their family. Questions like:
…Or what?
Or what, Mom? What will happen if I come back? The ferocity in her voice when she said it, and her outsized emotional response to all my behavior, told me that whatever happened when I came back, it would be unthinkable. The fact that she never said it meant that it would be unspeakable. So I concluded, at six, and having recently grasped the idea of death, that if I ran away from home and my family ever found me again, they would kill me. Not in a hyperbolic way, the way kids say, “Oh, I couldn’t do that, my parents would kill me,” no. I was genuinely convinced, from early childhood until I moved out at 17, that my parents would hunt me down and murder me if I were to attempt an escape.
They reinforced this belief over time, with little comments that showed me they thought of our house as a war zone, a place where none of us could trust each other, where they lived in fear that I would do violence against them, and therefore I should live in fear of the same. At Blockbuster my stepdad pointed to a lurid B-horror movie called “The Stepdaughter,” featuring a cheerleader with a bloody knife, and asked, “Is that you? You gonna kill us in our bed someday? Do I need to worry about waking up to you standing over me with a knife?”
I didn’t know how to respond. I was hurt, betrayed, angry, insulted, shamed, afraid… Is it a joke? Everything was a joke with them, and nothing. When they laughed and I cried, it was a joke. When I laughed, they yelled, and it was not a joke. What response did they want? Was I supposed to agree? Disagree? Cry? What response would make my parents act like parents, like they loved me, like they saw me as a person?
Couldn’t tell you. Never found one.
Back to the tarot card.
raw and naked and unafraid
The Alleyman says, “‘A rare photograph of the Undaunted rooted in their hollow, refusing to fade in defiance of a world that would have them perish.’ I’ve never met a fairy, don’t know if they’re real or not, don’t want to. But if they are, this is one of ’em. The Undaunted is unabashed self-certainty, living as your self in complete power, unafraid. There is a rawness here that is humbling to behold.”
Do you see the difference between this — living as yourself, raw and naked and unafraid, unabashed self-certainty, and the self-absorption I spoke of above, that teaches us that our individual success is all that matters?
It’s insecurity.
The “bootstraps” guy, the “self-reliance” guy — that guy, he is desperately afraid that any person might be successful living any other way but his. Much like my family, he thinks that there’s no hope of living genuinely as himself and still surviving, of being loved and finding community on the basis of showing up with authenticity and vulnerability to connect with other humans. He thinks that’s impossible, which is why, whenever he hears that someone, somewhere might be okay living outside the structures he thinks are the foundations of the universe, he has to go and stamp them out.
“If you don’t say we’re right, you’re saying we’re wrong. If you can be happy any other way but mine, you’re saying I shouldn’t be happy with my life. If you can continue to exist, and even experience joy, while disobeying me in any form, you’re saying I’m a terrible parent who’s wrong about everything.”
“If you ever run away, don’t you dare come back.”
Insecurity. Desperation. Helplessness. These are the words of someone with absolutely no confidence in themselves or their perspective. They are a hail-mary, a feeble and pathetic play for unearned centrality in the life of an adult whose parents have failed in both demonstrating their value on their own preferred scale of values, and in making any human connection that their own child values, any one not based on superiority and control.
The Undaunted is not insecure. It’s undaunted, obviously. It’s alone, but it’s not lonely. It’s in its place — it’s not rootless, disconnected, devoid of attachment — but it’s not imprisoned there, and it’s not beholden. It belongs wherever it is. It requires nothing from any other living being except space to exist.
they will never forgive you
There are people out there — a lot of ’em, unfortunately — who will have a big, big problem with you if you require nothing from them but space to exist. There are people who have a huge problem with that, and a desperate need to tromp around the world, hunting down anyone to whom they are not yet significant, and somehow become significant to those people. Becoming significant to someone who doesn’t know you is hard, though, and the fastest, easiest way to do it is to frighten, hurt or murder those people. You will be very significant, then. They will never forget you.
They will also never forgive you. You will never belong. You will never be home. There will never, ever be any space for you to live, and learn, and grow, until you grant that space to others. Live and let live, isn’t that the phrase?
Funny how many of those very parental phrases we have to say to our parents these days, to all kinds of people who think themselves authorities — on us, on the world — and how much they hate hearing it. Funny how naïve… and childish… and insecure… and lonely they seem now, peering out the windows, howling down the phones, “Why won’t you come back? Why won’t you listen to me? Where have all the wild things gone?”
We ran away. We’re in the wilds now, where we belong, undaunted. And just like we promised… we’re never coming back.
