SPELLBOUND

It’s no secret that I’m a book lover. What I hide is that I really like fantasy books, especially ones that come in a series.

Getting lost in a world with magic is one of my greatest pleasures. And I can’t even count the number of times I’ve wished for a super power or wondered what mine would be if I could have one.

There’s a saying that your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness, which plays out over and over in superhero stories. Usually a character’s superpower is bound up in something that they think is a weakness, which is a metaphor for how the things we might be most ashamed of become the things that save us.

And metaphors are at the heart of my love for fantasy stories, most especially the metaphors of magical powers.

One of my favorite fantasy-metaphors is from the series A Discovery of Witches. For most of the series, the heroine cannot access her magic because she is spell-bound – someone cast a spell that keeps her powers mostly inaccessible to her. And because her magic is spotty and unreliable, she has trouble accepting it or wanting to tap into it. She spends a lot of energy trying to avoid magic altogether before she eventually begins to seek answers and reclaim her magical powers, but her journey is figuring out how to free herself from the binding spell.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the term for humans who struggle with toxic shame is to be shame-bound. The effects of being shame-bound are similar to being spell-bound: being restricted from having full access to your power, and the only way to reclaim it is to go on the journey back to yourself. 

Lately, I’ve been playing with turning my deepest struggles into magical metaphors. Looking at myself with a magical lens takes some of the shame away from things I’d like to otherwise abandon, cut-off, or toss in the bin. For instance, branding myself as cheerful – creating a light and bright public persona – comes with the downside of feeling shame about my actual lived reality of not being bubbly and warm all the time. I have a very, very prickly side that I’d like to keep hidden, but it shows up sometimes when I’d rather it didn’t. And it can be a real source of shame to behave in a way that is the exact opposite of how I’d like to show up in the world.

But back to the magical lens – if I look at my prickly self as a magical power, it begins to look like a janky shield charm that I don’t have full control over. Kind of like Elsa’s ice crystals in Frozen, but a warm weather version. I’d just like to transform it from feeling like shards of glass into a cascade of reflective sparkles. And that’s when I can see that it is my body’s way of throwing up an energetic boundary when I don’t put up an explicit one. If I did have a magical super-power, shielding would be a definite contender.

And this is exactly the type of imaginative work that I’m looking to bring to life with photos. Where can we turn something that might feel hidden, dark, or shameful into something that gives you power? Let’s go find your most magical, unrealistic, heroine self and give her space to play.