Back on Day Six, I set out a plan of action to start the search and rescue plan for Operation Goblin Hunt.
The three day action plan was: make a list of all factors that may have contributed to the goblins becoming trapped.
When I look back on the Four Goblins of the Apocalypse, and the events that helped create them, I can see a couple of big factors right off the back.
Suppression of Emotions
In my family, like in so many other families of the 70s and 80s, emotions were not really a good thing. I mean, having them was fine. Expressing them, especially the negative ones, was frowned upon in polite company. “Nobody likes a Debbie Downer” was especially fun to hear when your name was actually Debbie.
Oddly enough, this restriction against expressing strong emotions seemed only to apply to the children int he family. Screaming arguments, raucous laughter, and slamming of doors were perfectly acceptable if you were an adult.
As a highly empathic child, living in an environment where there was lots of fighting, loud voices, and substance use (not necessarily abuse) going on, I found the only way to survive was to shove emotions down inside of me. As expected, the end result of this practice was depression, an eating disorder, and an inability to express my emotions in a healthy way.
Suppression of Truth
I learned very early that the truth is a dangerous thing. Expressing that truth can be even more dangerous.
There’s a good reason for the high-risk nature of truth: nobody can prove exactly what it is, yet everybody will fight to the death to defend their version of it.
When you spend your formative years in an environment where truth is equal parts subjective and indisputable, you learn quickly to keep your thoughts to yourself.
Unless, of course, you’re me. And then you just open your mouth all the time and speak your version of the truth because it never occurs to you that that will get you in trouble. It took me years to learn to judge a room, feel for the pulse, suss out the dangers. It took me years to learn that a peaceful lie (or half-truth) was much better than a truth that would get you yelled at, or bullied at school, or lectured ad nauseum.
And after all, there’s no such thing as actual truth, is there? I mean, it’s all relative.
That sort of thinking is a midnight snack for growing goblins.
Suppression of Dissent
The inevitable result of the suppression of emotion and the suppression of truth is almost textbook Authoritarianism 101: suppression of dissent. When emotions are not allowed to be expressed (or even felt in some cases) for fear of retribution, and when the truth is flexible at best, there really is no ground for rational and healthy dissent. Your arguments are invalid, in the current vernacular.
It would be easy to blame this on family dynamics, and yes, they were of course at play. But the challenges of being a girl growing up in the 70s and 80s can not be understated. From the time I started spouting breasts, I like most girls in my cohort was subjected to ridicule and low-grade sexual harassment from both neighborhood boys and schoolmates. Girls who tried to complain were told that the boys “just had a crush on them” or that “boys will be boys.” Girls who were mouthy and told the boys off were “difficult” and “bossy” or the worst, “unladylike.” Rape culture as a concept might not have been generally known in the 1970s, but as an actual culture, it was thriving in the United States.
Add to that the the challenges of being a smart, weird girl in a conservative Southern Catholic school who never fully grasped that what seemed like normal, rational ideas to her were obnoxious attention-seeking behaviors to her teachers and school administrators. (Because, Heaven forbid a fat girl in a plaid skirt point out inconsistencies in the Catholic religion…..)
After several years of batting my head against these external sources of suppression, I suppose it was just easier and more efficient to suppress them myself. Why bother pointing out something is upsetting when it’ll just get ignored? Why bother seeking help from authority figures against bullies when you’ll only be told to stop taking it personally?
About six months ago, I purchased a book called A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present. I got about two chapters in before I had to just stop. It occurred to me that, if modern women were to really understand the depth of oppression we have experienced as a gender for the last few thousand years, the majority of us would simply start screaming with a rage so deep and fiery it wouldn’t run out of fuel until the lot of us had been dead fifteen years from exhaustion.
I have more than a bit of that rage in me, and it’s rusting over the locks that are imprisoning the goblins. I think I’m going to need to work through some of it before I can start opening locks and freeing these poor creatures.
The Goblin Hunter 