I Am a Feminist and a Melting Latter-Day Saint: A Parable
This is a weird little parable about what it feels like for me to be a feminist in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints:
Witches are not born. They are made. Alchemy and circumstance swirl inside a woman’s blood, transforming her into something else.
A witch is melted from within. Her guts are singed to ashes. Or melted into scars.
The incredible thing about a witch is that she doesn’t die in the flames that made her.
Not all women stand in the flames; some women thrive in this world made by men.
But witches don’t. A witch has an itch under her skin. She walks in the wrong direction through the universe and matter rubs her cells the wrong way, creating friction and heat that burns and burns. The more this backward woman presses forward the wrong way, the more she ignores her body and the burning, bloody signs from within.
She wants to belong and becomes good at pretending to be like other women.
But an itch becomes a fever that becomes a burn that blisters and bleeds until she ignites. It’s an invisible flame only she can feel . . . and no one believes her, that she’s burning from the inside – that she wasn’t made for this world.
“This isn’t right,” she says, “something is wrong.” But no one listens and there is no path or precedence for witches. It’s all been burned.
So she keeps walking the good woman’s path not made for witches. She learns well to ignore her body. She learns well that the universe hates her and burns her. So she stands in the fire where she doesn’t belong, where no one listens, and where people correct her and deform her because they can’t see the way she is melting.
They tell her God is a man and the universe burns inside her. They tell her God’s voice is their voice and her heart is on fire. They tell her they have the magic she can taste if she stands in the fire and burns away. So she does.
She’s disappearing and her tears evaporating.
But then, one day she falls out of the fire, and no one notices. She lies on the earth, breathing and melted. It’s quiet out of the fire. It’s quiet and the witch is so tired from walking through the universe the wrong way.
Smoke hisses in the embers and charcoal of her soul. While she lies there in the stillness, crispy and scarred, she realizes that she is the firemaker: she made the fire like a falling star through the atmosphere.
The firemaker wonders why she waited so long to listen to the fire inside her body. Why did she push so hard for so long trying to follow men and women?
She doesn’t know. But now she is what she made herself. She followed the wrong path for too long but she will be okay.
Like a baby who does not yet know how to walk with the universe, she doesn’t know how to find her path.
All she knows is that she is so tired. And she can finally breathe.
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