🦊 Tales of courage
"I want to feel again that pleasant sensation of discovering what influences other humans to be who they are and, at the same time, share what shapes my way of existing."
(This was my first Portuguese newsletter here on Substack, in October 2019. While I’ve been writing online over two decades, this marked my return to the “slice of life” and relationships style of writing, and I thought of sharing with you also in English.)
Hi, thank you for being here.
When I announced my interest in sharing my writings and found a group of humans who showed interest in reading me, I felt a warmth in my heart. This silent support coming from the people around me nourishes me and tells me that there is space to express what is alive inside of me.
My writings over the past years have mostly been connected to some specific project. Texts about writing. Texts about living better. Texts about non-violent communication. Texts written with the intention of teaching, to be read by those who want to learn something.
What I want here, in Olhar de Raposa (my Portuguese newsletter’s name would be translated as something like “Fox’s Gaze”), is not to teach. I want to share what is alive inside. This is an expression I learned from non-violent communication, which invited me to look inside and realize not only what and how I think, but also what and how I feel, how I react to what happens, how I yearn for what might happen according to the stories I tell myself.
Right now, for example, there's an inner voice whispering that this text doesn't deserve to be shared, that I should have thought twice before starting to write it, that I had other ideas and should follow them because this is bad, that all the people who open this text will give up on it since it won't make sense to them. These fears are alive inside. Fear that I, who have been taking care of writers for seven years, am not enough of a writer – whatever that means. Fear that the same people who nurtured this movement will perceive – they will finally perceive! – that it's not worth dedicating energy to be here and that there is much more in life instead that could be worth the investment of time.
These fears and so many others are old acquaintances. I consider calling them friends. I believe they want my well-being above all else, even if that means never stepping out of what I already know, out of the specific situations I think I know how will end. These fears are part of me along with so many other parts, a multitude of pieces pointing to different sides, taking care of distinct aspects. "The human being is strange, a trap to oneself," says Flaira Ferro in the song "Me Curar de Mim" (To heal from Myself). I couldn't agree more.
She sings further: "to fill myself with what matters, I need to empty myself, face my beasts, recognize myself as a hypocrite. I'm bad, I'm a liar, vain and envious, I'm petty, I'm a grain of sand, foolish and prejudiced. I'm needy, showy, I smile, I'm corrupt, cunning, gossipy, moralist, interested, and it hurts, hurts, hurts to expose myself like this."
I am all that and much more.
Flaira continues: "but if I don't have the courage to face my flaws, in what way, how will I heal myself from me, if such healing exists, I don't know, I just know that I seek it in me, I just know that I seek… To heal from myself."
This newsletter is about and from me, about my way of living and looking at myself, but not only that. There is no Tales or fox without the world in which I transit, this world that shapes me, wounds me, and nourishes me. This world that looks at me and instigates me to look back, that teaches me to see and also to search for other ways of seeing. This world that constantly reveals how it cannot be seen in its truly, raw, unfiltered entirety. I'm a grain of sand, my field of vision is limited, what's left for me is to exchange lenses here and there to see where will take me.
Olhar de Raposa is about this: experiencing a non-violent, light, and lucid lens. Non-violence without lucidity is anesthesia. Lucidity without non-violence can well be apocalyptic. Non-violence and lucidity are, therefore, a pair that makes a lot of sense, and as I don't believe that two are the limit of what can be combined with love and intelligence, I add lightness.
Two things motivated me to think about this text.
I have a friend who plans to write a research project to enter graduate school, and we recently talked about his motivations. In our conversation, I remembered what mattered to me during my academic studies: intellectual exchange, openness to investigation in the face of what I don't know, references that provoke me to reconsider from other points of view. During grad school, I shared references with other people who also liked to investigate life, and how I fondly remember texts, videos, and conversations that touched me so deeply that they became part of those voices that dialogue within me.
I want to feel again that pleasant sensation of discovering what influences other humans to be who they are and, at the same time, share what shapes my way of existing. I want to affect myself.
The second thing that motivated me to think and write this text was a short film I watched a week ago. There are things I see or read that pass quickly, skim the surface, and disappear from memory. This is perhaps the broadest category that organizes my experiences – I imagine yours too, it seems very human to me, even for survival purposes.
This short film I watched, however, penetrated deeply into my feelings. I've watched it over and over again. I'm enchanted by the animation, the music, the dubbing, the narrative. I finished watching it inspired to show the short to the whole world because I want other people to experience this excitement that has completely taken me over. The reality is that I fell in love with this short to the point of regaining the courage to start this Olhar de Raposa adventure.
Without further ado, here is the short. It's dubbed in French, but subtitles are available in English or automatically translated into Portuguese.
I can think of multiple reasons why I liked this animation so much. For starters, it's the kind of thing I would have liked to watch when I was a child or teenager, back when I believed there was something wrong with me because I was affected by the world in a different way than I perceived other people being affected. Specifically, I didn't know it was possible – and I made countless mental exercises to convince myself that it wasn't – for two men to have affectionate and sexual feelings for each other. I am a child of 1986, so positive references to homosexuality were scarce until well into my adulthood.
Mental note (now public): in the future, comment on the sex magazines my grandmother (or was it my brother?) kept at home, the book on consumption behaviors of homosexuals that I found in the Psychology library during college and that I took home at least five times during undergrad, a song in the form of a parody that described sex between two men, and also a middle school colleague reporting on how he seduced a construction worker.
Back to the short, I wanted to be both characters. In a way, in the past, I was, but I didn't have the same courage to announce my desires. Even with fear, even with voices whispering that it would be better to leave it alone, the protagonist goes there and continues on his path to tell his best friend that he had an erotic dream and that maybe he's in love with him. This is what in non-violent communication we call authentic expression, when we say something that matters to us and that we are aware could impact our relationship.
The friend, Gab, could have reacted in a thousand ways. He could have said "no", joked, belittled, ended the relationship, doubted, hit. How many stories with gay characters have I not seen or read which scripts were exactly these, the suffering of misfit, a confirmation that there is no place for this kind of feeling?
In the short, he reacts with non-violence, lightness, and lucidity. He embraces the friend's feeling, offers a path, opens himself to the experience, and doesn't put up obstacles where they don't exist. Gab is present in the moment. He could just as well have said "sorry, I don't feel the same" followed by a "do you want to tell me more about what you're feeling?" or "let's go get some ice cream over there?", or so many other equally caring and welcoming things – I emphasize that it's not the "yes, let's try" that touched me in this story, although I certainly appreciated this resolution to the narrative, but the care and affection present at the moment.
This short not only teaches me to deal with my fears by sharing them with those who matter to me and can support me in dealing with them; it also shows me a representation of possible love between two friends. The Tales of the past might have lived a little more securely if he had learned that this is a possibility.
Following the line of "references I would have liked to have when I was younger," the movie "Luca," from Pixar + Disney, is another recommendation. The story is about two sea monsters who become friends and venture together into a world that rejects them. Although it's not about the queer experience (a word I'm using to encompass a whole spectrum of gender and sexuality experiences that don't conform to the traditional norms and expectations of our current society), countless elements of the queer experience are there: the closet, the discovery of possible love, the sense of novelty, experimentation, the rejection of one's own identity to ensure survival, the search for alternative families that offer shelter and support, Luca has it all.
I watched a video that argues this point very well. It's available on YouTube in English with subtitles or translations automatically generated:
Thank you for reading this far!
A fox hug 🦊
Tales
Não gosto de falar sobre meus conflitos internos pois fiz muito isso no passado e peguei trauma mas, obrigada de verdade, eu precisava me sentir motivada
I love that we travel similar paths. All blessings to us!