Three times I’ve been given the opportunity to express my mad self – the self that is incomprehensible and dangerous and wild.
The first time I couldn’t speak. The prohibitions against nonsense that have been drilled into me, the need to speak clearly and be understood so powerfully ingrained in my box that I was not capable of speaking words while maintaining a connection with my mad self. I had to settle for nonverbal utterances and gestures instead.
The second time I found I could speak nonsense and I enjoyed the freedom to say things I would never normally dare to. This time I got into yelling at my audience, trying to get a rise out of them, to provoke them in some way. It was delicious to be disgraceful, to say all the things I’m ‘too nice’ to let out.
The third time was magic. It stopped being about the audience at all and became a dance with myself, my secret, hidden self. All the parts within me that go unspoken for fear of being unintelligible, all the wrong and strange things, the things that feel true and make no sense. It was liberating and exciting. I challenged myself to keep roving, keep changing it up as soon as I found a comfortable rhythm. Each time I discovered hidden desires and pockets of wisdom. I called for aliens to beam up humanity and save us from ourselves and found myself flooded with relief. There’s a part of me that dearly longs to be rescued in that way.
The most surprising thing about that third time was the feedback from my audience. A number of people found my ravings captivating and even beautiful. I have often felt my creativity is hemmed in by my box’s obsession with being clear and intelligible and yet here was clear feedback that something beautiful is possible outside that.
This experience gifted me a hunger to keep exploring what my body might want to express beyond the confines of my box. I made a pact with a friend to write a paragraph each day from that place, I call it fey.
Fey means strange or unusual in any of certain ways, as, variously, eccentric, whimsical, visionary, elfin, shy, otherworldly. I like the sense of wildness, it is untamed and uncivilised and I like the connection to other worlds. When I write from this place it broadens my perceptions, opens me wide to the yawning expanse of existence. Giving myself this space each day is having an impact on how I show up in my life, I’m less contained, less shy, more bold.
Now I’m choosing to go public with my experiment. For the next 11 days I will share a paragraph of fey writing each day #11daysfey. Feel free to join me, let’s become uncivilised together and see what lies outside the bounds we set for ourselves.