writing session on 6 January 2022 | moderator: LaSara Firefox Allen
Prompt phrases: “Dream and Desire” & “A Trip”
Over and over again the therapist asks her, “What is your dream? What is it that you most want to do, or be, or have?”
Sometimes he throws a curveball and says, “What did you dream about when you were little? What did you want to be when you grew up?”
An airline pilot, she thinks.
She knows this exercise; she’s played the same trick with herself and others countless times, digging into the unconscious, working your way around to discovering your deepest desire so you know what path you want to take based on what your purest self wants. It’s well-meant, it’s not that it isn’t, but she stopped wanting to be a pilot when she was about 8 and then later when she was a grown-up she discovered that in fact commercial pilots —
(and that’s what she’d wanted to be, a commercial pilot with her own plane, imagining herself in the cockpit of the Little People toy plane someone had given her, welcoming passengers up the fold-out stairs)
— commercial pilots have an absolutely wretched time of it: sleep deprived with unremarkable salaries, snatching a night’s rest in a dormitory-style apartment (in the documentary she saw, there were literally metal-frame bunkbeds like the ones from 4-H camp). It was the same disillusionment as finding out that certain jobs that seem like they should be glamorous (acting!) are in fact less than that (endless auditions; degrading proposals; not the role you want, ever). So she doesn’t mention that dream.
Instead she does the digging herself, tries on different iterations of pilot-ness. It becomes much clearer when she thinks about what the abstract idea of piloting means – to be in transit, to be liminal, to be in between – she wants to always be moving, most comfortable when she’s ungrounded and fleeting, between this place in and the next. She hears an episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me with Kellee Edwards, a vibrant woman (probably younger than she is, she thinks with chagrin) who discovered at a young age that people could just…fly their own planes. So that’s what Kellee decided that’s what she would do.
She follows Kellee on Instagram now, to learn the secret – how do you get to just fly? Do you buy your own plane? Is there a time share for planes? Is there some secret that Kellee isn’t sharing, a secret about how the things she does and the paths she takes are harder and meaner than she makes it seem on social media?
A Trip
She’s realized that she’s experiencing COVID burnout, if not finally then, again, maybe? because her plans all revolve around making plans for a trip somewhere. Mostly to foreign places, almost all of them with one or two darling friends and lots of movement. There again is that transit space, that in-between, the point where the waves meet the sand. She has been stationary for much too long and it’s wearing at the seams of her mind. Every time she dips a toe in the water of planning (What year should it be? Will she be able to manage going to Newfoundland if she also wants to do the Camino de Santiago in Portugal?) the future offspring of Omicron cast their shadows on the calendar. Who knows when she’ll be able to pack for the airport without worrying?
All envy aside, Kellee Edwards is an incredible explorer, traveler, and adventurer and is well worth spending time following on all the platforms. I cannot even with an animal-print wetsuit.
The Body Year 