Burn the Whale Down

“It’s so interesting what happens when women get older. We carry this wisdom, but no one cares. And we’ve survived the death cult of capitalism but, really, you just want us to get out of the way, don’t you? You want us to be silent. Quiet as the grave.” ~ Martha Ellison, The Morning Show

Fuck that.

That quiet grave?

It’s the belly of the whale on the hero’s journey that wasn’t necessarily culled from the monomyth with women in mind. And in midlife many of us are camped out in that belly, right next to the whale’s colon. We’re rubbing our hands in front of a dwindling fire, amongst the bones of our predecessors— women full of wisdom, wrinkles and wit—while we unpluck the weaving of our wild natures and disavow the wise women we are to become.

And society would prefer that we stay right there. It doesn’t matter that we heeded all the calls. It doesn’t matter that we slayed so many dragons to get to where we are now. It doesn’t matter that we returned with boon after boon after boon. You know, the ones we were told mattered. We followed the script of the patriarchy and that “death cult of capitalism” only to become invisible to everyone around us. Literally. Do you know how many women in midlife have uttered those words to me? “I walk through the grocery store and it’s as if I don’t exist.”

I think about my own life and how I popped a needle in my arm that contained that whole masculine structure. Remnants of it still run in my veins.

Following the Man’s Map & Refusing to Ask for Directions

I pushed so damned hard as I played the game, climbing the corporate ladder after I’d tried to refuse the call from the Area VP. Eventually he wore me down, and I accepted and donned my armor.

It was the early nineties, ladies. I wore khakis, a blazer with shoulder pads, and…I kid you not…maroon loafers with a damned tassel. I was about a buck ten weight-wise and looked like a sad linebacker, slapping on the Clinique cosmetics and putting Band-Aids over my tattoo so I wouldn’t offend anyone.

My sword was my willingness to work harder than everyone else around me. I was twenty-four and worked twelve…fourteen hours days during mergers and acquisitions and I managed 167 district offices. I slept in hotels in Parker, Arizona next to the railroad tracks and called the “front desk” to ask for a bar for my window when someone knocked on said window.

I ate homemade tortillas and red chili in Los Lunas, New Mexico brought to me at 8:30 pm by a sweet, sweet woman whose company we’d just purchased, and I ate while manually importing their thousands of customer’s worth of data.

Unfortunately, at that time, I was too young to know how to shut off my emotions—a requisite for this overly adapted, skewed-up version of the hero’s journey at play today. And I was fired for it. We had purchased a large outfit in Nowhere, Nevada and my colleagues and I met up at the previous owner’s home for cocktail hour before we headed to a steakhouse to dine and swallow bullshit. I walked into this man’s home and felt exactly like Jim Carrey of Ace Ventura fame when he strolled into that “lovely room of death”.

There were dead, mounted animals. Every. Where. There were swans, and zebras, and cougars, and tigers, and bears, Oh, fucking, my. There were delicate white and brown cranes propped up on their spindly legs. There were tiny black squirrels sitting on their haunches, their tiny paws reaching mid-air for salvation. I couldn’t say a word. I stood there; disgusted; flabbergasted; wanting to hurl and curl up in a ball of crying mass. Apparently, I didn’t need words because, “Melanie, you didn’t have to say anything. Everyone knew exactly what you were thinking. It was offensive.”

That was my last corporate job, but it didn’t stop me from continuing to embark on more and more harrowing journeys. These ones involved trying to fit into the world of the “literati” who’ve read Faust once. A bachelors. An MFA. Craft book after craft book. (I read every one.) And…oh…the writer’s workshops. The pain of all those false boons and dollars still feels like a raw hemorrhoid after a long spell on cold cement.

Oh, my loves…the boon isn’t out there.

We’re heroines, not heroes. We’re fiercer. We’re braver. We’re Sally Field in Steel Magnolias. Maureen Murdock named The Heroine’s Journey decades ago and not many folks listened. Which just furthers my point.

And our boon, and I hope I can say this with enough certainty, our boon doesn’t look like something “out there.” It looks like something “in here.” The things we’ve disowned in ourselves. The reconciliation with the feminine that values being over doing, receptivity over pushing, and embodiment in a body that doesn’t feel like it has to squeeze into our Lululemons.

Without the real boon—that coming back to our Selves—our descent was just tourism.

This is what I know. No one is coming to save us. They’re not going to unroll the ladder down through that whale’s esophagus and muck through multiple stomachs to get to that colon where we reside, are they?

You know, we do need the hero’s journey in the sense of the life force energy to get ourselves up on outta there. But it’s going to look different through the Heroine’s Journey lens.

And what we become when we’ve integrated? Artists. Elders. Storytellers. Creatives. Embodied beings who’ve healed from their burnout—no longer willing to embark on a journey not made for them—emotion-wise beings who’ve brought their heretics home—all those exiled, disavowed, still-wild bits of themselves within, and ripened beings who burned the whale down.

Dear PETA. No whales were harmed in the writing of this article. It’s a metaphor.