Guides to flying for flightless birds
When I was younger, I would always dream about the day that I’d get to disappear somewhere far away, where I could finally be alone, which meant that I’d be free. Solitude has always been the thing I coveted most, because it meant that no one could control me. To me, loneliness meant liberation. Really, being alone is the ultimate privilege for a woman—we’d only gained the ability to be alone very recently.
The other night at a dinner party I asked a woman I admired if she ever wished she had a daughter. Having three sons like she did felt like my own personal nightmare. Whenever I entertain the idea of having children of my own, I feel like if I could look into the future and see that I’d only have sons, I’d choose to have no children at all.
That sounds like a cruel thing to say, I know. I have three younger brothers who I love very much. But I also grew up around many families that had only boys. Boys who grew up to scribble swastikas and girls getting violently penetrated on whiteboards, boys who would cast mocking glances towards each other whenever any woman dared to voice an opinion around them, boys who would turn to the mothers that had quietly kept their atheism to themselves their entire lives to ask “Mom, why won’t you wear the hijab? You’re embarrassing the family.”
So I don’t want only sons.
Her answer was immediate — “No. I don’t like girls.”
“They’re difficult to raise,” another woman agreed, pursing her lips and nodding.
“Because in our culture, girls are prized.”
“They are the jewels of the family.”
“…You need to protect them...”
“…Keep a close eye on them...”
“They’re too much to worry about!”
“Ayah’s father always says that anything can happen to the boys and he wouldn’t care. If something happened to Ayah? The world would end.”
This line of thinking has been my life’s damnation.
I offer a tight-lipped smile and look back down at my phone. These conversations used to make me very angry. At this point I am just tired of listening to them.
I liken being a girl raised in a conservative family in the west to being a pet bird with clipped wings.
You are placed in a cage by the window. The cage is warm and safe and comfortable, but it’s very small. You see such colorful and interesting things outside of it, but never get to interact with them directly. The outside seems wonderful, and you dream of what it would be like to experience it yourself. You see other birds fly by sometimes — they don’t look like you, and they don’t act like you, but they are birds nonetheless, so the abhorrently stupid thought occurs to you that maybe one day you can be like them too.
One day, the cage door is accidentally left ajar.
Excited beyond belief, you burst out, and manage to get in a few feet of backbreaking flight before ceremoniously crashing headfirst onto the floor. You’re incredibly startled. You’ve seen other birds outside the window soar, you think, confused. What just happened to me?
You try again from the floor. You use all of your energy (is it supposed to be this hard? They make it seem so effortless), getting a few feet into the air before crashing back down again.
Eventually you are found, your flailing attempts at flight chuckled at, and are placed back into the cage.
Escaping the cage becomes a slow learning process. You have to wait for opportunities, and there isn’t any room to practice your flight inside, so you conclude that the next best thing is to more carefully study the birds outside. How they take off, how they glide to expend less energy. You glance back at your own wings and now realize your own deficiency. You will have to try twice as hard to fly like them. You feel a gnawing sense of urgency in your chest.
You try the back door. You try a different window. It’s the same story every time. Crash, get discovered, get thrown back in the cage. Your life devolves into a series of obsessive attempts to leave that cage.
Slowly you are able to manage brief visits outside. They leave you scared and exhausted, but you’ve learned a lot. You encounter many strange things that you don’t recognize. A lot of it terrifies you. Some of it tries to hurt you, and some succeeds. You struggle to differentiate between newness and danger, so you decide err on the side of caution to protect yourself from things you do not recognize.
After far too many attempts to permanently leave the cage fail, you realize that your crazed and desperate attempts to escape as quickly as possible are a fool’s errand, because you cannot fly on clipped wings. First, you must mend them. Quietly, of course, slowly, and without fuss. You will have to deceive the captors who love you, pretend to love your cage. If you reveal your plans, you could be sabotaged. But you now understand that you must heal before you can fly.
You continue to sneak brief trips outside, learning bit by bit. You begin meeting other animals, who are strange, funny, stupid, cruel, and kind. You are just as alien to them as they are to you. You can begin to adapt, but it’s their world that you are molding yourself into. You frequently feel like a stranger, and no one reads your book as well as you can read theirs.
The past several years spent in silent observation have granted you great pattern recognition. Begin to recognize the little quirks in each being you pass — every flavor, every theme, every wound, repeated. A body is a finite space. There are only so many configurations it can take.
What of the mind? Pessimistically you believe that no one can ever really escape the circumstances that molded them. Your life has been proof of that. A smaller voice inside pushes you to keep trying. The version of you today is much more knowledgeable, and therefore much more tired, than the little one that crashed into the floor many years ago. For some reason the world outside seems more tired, too. Often it feels to you that the world is contracting in on itself just as you have set out to explore it.
Thankfully, not everything is foreign. You even start hearing stories of others like you. Some have succeeded, but are far away now. Some did not get happy endings—preyed on by other animals, meeting tragic ends in falls from great heights. You despair at their fates, catastrophic thoughts of the same things happening to you flooding your mind. Adapting to life outside of the cage will be dangerous. Life inside the cage is not an option, but you begin to fear that it may be the only life you were molded for.
Enough time has passed, and enough experience gained, that now your wings can passably fly. To all but a very discerning observer, they don’t seem as if they were ever clipped at all. But in that time your mind has grown heavy. You come to your final realization: that the healing never stops, only changes form. This is where your inner pessimist was correct. We must mend our own wounds the rest of our lives. And you will die with your wounds.
An even longer time has passed now, and you’ve more or less adapted to life outside of the cage. You have finally begun building an identity beyond the one from the cage, but it is a solitary journey. Your peers learned the lessons you take now very long ago.
On occasion, your previously arrested development becomes gingerly revealed through the necessity of conversation. You understand that you need to show some vulnerability in order to connect. You don’t do this often, because the conversations become awkward and misconstrued, more explanation than discussion. Most are well meaning, but all ultimately hold perspectives entirely alien to your own, as yours are to them. Often you have to start by describing to them what a cage even is. Still, then, they always ask one question that makes clear they will fundamentally never understand where you came from.
“Why didn’t you just fly out of the cage?”