About respecting your own needs

[cjsmith]

“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/

Comments

[labelleizzy]

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.

[cjsmith]

I know that mental health professionals make a distinction between - I’m not going to phrase this right - emotion for reasons that make sense, and emotion that doesn’t seem to have a “good cause”. Despair as part of grief after losing a loved one, versus just despair all the time, for example.

What I don’t understand is how any woman can be NOT depressed ever. I mean. Note how the phrasing in the first paragraph glosses over in whose opinion the cause appears to be “sufficient”. Our culture is so steeped in misogyny that we don’t recognize “being a woman in a society that systematically and cruelly destroys women for male pleasure and convenience” as a perfectly, completely, 100% valid reason for not being all that happy.