cjsmith: (Default)
cjsmith ([personal profile] cjsmith) wrote2021-10-05 05:34 pm

About respecting your own needs

“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore. I found a copy in the reserve’s gift shop among the baseball caps and bumper stickers that said GIVE A WHOOP. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.


https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/07/16/the-crane-wife/
labelleizzy: (Default)

[personal profile] labelleizzy 2021-10-07 01:13 am (UTC)(link)
And since the point of those lessons is to facilitate manipulation and control, often for sexual reasons, ...if I actually sit with that understanding for very long I have such rage that I can't function. Probably part of my depression, tbqh.