meeting the moths
"use your wings, little human girl, before it's too late."
hello, reader!
I’m excited to share that every other weekend I’ll be releasing a special post for paid subscribers. It might be an excerpt from the current draft of my book, a journal entry or prayer, or just a personal reflective piece like this one that I’m not quite ready to share with a wider audience (though I’ll always include a portion of it in the free preview!)
author’s note & intro
At the risk of sounding like every other millennial who goes to therapy, one of the most healing things I’ve ever learned is how to reframe parts of my own story with empathy and curiosity instead of fear or judgment.
For example, for years I carried deep shame over the confusing way my body responded to certain scenes in books or movies: ones where a small or vulnerable (often female) character was captured, silenced, or otherwise endangered. I’d started experiencing these sensations as a child myself, and my shame only amplified as I grew older but didn’t grow out of them. Eventually I began to fear that there was something wrong with me; something that secretly found a sick sense of pleasure in someone else’s suffering.
Once I finally began to process these fears in therapy, I started to better understand my body’s response to these scenes. I learned that our bodies cannot differentiate between different types of arousal (e.g. sexual arousal vs. fear-based arousal), and that therefore it’s not uncommon for people, especially as children, to develop an involuntary arousal-like response to non-sexual stimuli — such as a frightening or intense moment in a kid’s movie.
A little while ago I shared a piece called waking up the moths, an excerpt from my memoir (in progress) that describes a childhood memory I have of tentatively returning to one of the first scenes I can remember triggering these complex feelings. The piece below gently explores the origin of those feelings — “meeting the moths,” if you will — in an attempt to reframe what I once feared meant something evil or dark about my own heart as a moment of childlike innocence, overwhelm, and wonder.
I hope you enjoy it :)
love,
kati lynn
I tell them I’m afraid of losing the magic.
I feel it now as I think about it, that strange tickle right below the place where my chest dips into a hollow (the one I assumed everyone else had too, until I saw other girls in two-piece swimsuits and realized their ribs didn’t jut up from their bodies the way mine did while lying on a beach towel.)
Maybe that’s where they live—the moths, the magic.
Maybe they hang upside down from my ribcage like bats, wings tucked in tight until the next scene stirs them awake. Maybe they feel that first pulse of fear like a gust of wind, all those feathery ears twitching in time with the rising drumbeat of my heart. Maybe they uncurl their sharp little toes from around my bones and let the surge carry them fluttering up to my collarbone and down again, then up a little higher and down a little lower, again and again and again and again.
I first met the moths when I was four or so, sitting with my legs tucked in tight before a square black box that told me stories when I fed it. I sat and I watched a different kind of bug, one much bigger and meaner than my moths, as he stomped around the screen and made everyone around him look small even for bugs.
The moths knew him before I did. They tried to warn me with their butter-soft wings beating against my sternum, a flurry of frightened whispers trickling up through my throat and tugging at something behind my half-covered eyes.
Get up, they said.
Run.
Use your wings, little human girl, before it’s too late.
But I don’t. Not that first time, anyway.
