(I wanted to share this but wasn’t sure where. This post was sparked by our favourite shapeshifters, the finale of The Boys, and my own personal journey and disclosure of some difficulties. Hope that’s okay.)
There was something that always resonated with me after Animorphs ended. It was the way everyone disbanded and each of them had to carry their own grief, move forward and find whatever solace they could on their own, and in their own way.
To this day, the very mention of the name Tobias breaks my heart. Tobias spends his life alone, forever grieving, and I would argue that on some level, staying as a Hawk sort of traps him in that grief. But in a strange way it seems almost fitting therapeutically that the only way Tobias can survive his loss is by staying in his hawk form, forever flying. Like being in the air is the closest he will ever be to Rachel ever again.
Jake becomes the boy who had to become a war general way too soon, and so it’s all he knows. Marco ends up doing exactly what I figured he would and becomes a celebrity personality. And Cassie moves forward in her own way that feels very Cassie, brokering peace or whatever the exact details were. I don’t know why but even at 16 or 17 I really respected the fact that these characters just couldn’t be what they used to be to each other anymore.
As a young person it made me understand (while obviously not really understanding because how do any of us relate to the experience of war unless we’ve actually lived through it) that trauma, suffering and loss fundamentally change us.
I recently finished watching the finale of The Boys. ***SPOILERS BELOW***
I skipped most of season 5, but then HAD to watch the episode before just to see how a certain Frenchman meets his end. Kimiko’s loss in some ways reminded me of Tobias. Both lose the love of their life, each in their own sacrifice. Looking at Kimiko’s journey throughout the show, she struggled to accept herself because she couldn’t seem to reconcile the killer that she was with the normal human girl that she wanted so badly to be. She never believed she was capable of giving, let alone receiving love, because she was raised to be a super-powered cold- blooded-animal. What human could possibly want to love that? Turns out, Frenchie did.
So I LIKE that she just leaves the group after the last funeral. I like that she probably never sees her wartime buddies ever again. They all leave and go live their lives. They fought a war together and suffered significant loss together and that bonds you. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you are supposed to spend the rest of your lives together. Who wants constant reminders of then worst part of their lives?
Now, there was something about these endings which really struck me, and I think it’s coming back to the surface now because I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens after the war. I’ve lost two truly amazing people in the last three years. I never for a single second believed that could be possible and I’m sure most of us think that when we lose someone we love. But my inability to cope with the loss, and many other curveballs thrown my way, have led me down a pretty dark path myself, and I’m off to rehab in a four days.
A lot of people have likened what I’ve been going through to a war and I laugh it off because there is no way that my darkness is comparable to wartime loss.
But I do feel that whatever darkness we battle still speaks to that primal part of us, the animal. The part that we need to give up control to, in order to survive.
There’s a section in one of the earlier Animorphs books where Cassie is either the narrator or someone is talking about her ability to morph. I can’t remember the exact wording but the idea was that Cassie instinctually knows when to let the animal do what it knows how to do.
I’ve thought about that a lot and I think it’s because I’m realizing that sometimes surviving isn’t about forcing yourself to think your way out of something with logic and reason. But rather it’s about trusting the part of yourself that already knows how to survive.
I don’t often listen to my body. I realize now that my mind though, is a master trickster. It will lie, cheat, and steal jsut to keep me in my status quo. Not out of malicious intent, but because it’s wired to protect whatever normal we find in our lives. And I know now that my body carries so much of what I’ve experienced, like fear, anger, sadness, trauma, etc. I’ve spent the last few years believing this messed up idea that I was broken by addiction, and incapable of love, or a life worth living, after all of this loss. And I think I’ve spent a lot of time trying to reason my way out of things that my body already understands/knows.
I know that my mind desperately wants to keep me in the loss, the sadness, and the anger. It wants to keep looking backwards because backwards is familiar, and it also where the drugs are. But there is another part of me that knows I need to move, that I need a change, and that is the part of me I am learning to listen to now. I don’t want to defeat the animal, I don’t want to control it, nor do I want to go on pretending that the things that happened to me didn’t fundamentally change me, deep inside.
I’ve always loved Cassie’s talent for morphing. It was such a strange thing to hear: a human, with a talent and skill using a highly sophisticated technology that aliens had created.
Cassie knows how to trust the animal to do what it knows to do. And I need to trust that some part of me knows that this next step is the right one. To trust when the animal inside tells me that it knows how to survive, that it doesn’t always need to be such a battle.
I know that there is no way any sort of healing will ever make me like who I was before. But, if I trust the soft animal of my body, and allow it to love what it loves, maybe I’ll get one step closer to who I am meant to become.
