From the essay shelf
The Second Awakening
I found the word at forty-six, at the kitchen table, on a Sunday morning, while being annoyed about something else.
I was reading an article about young people who wear animal masks to school. It was written in the tone such articles take, half amused and half alarmed, and I was reading it in the same spirit, the way one reads about a fashion one is relieved to be too old for. Halfway down there was a paragraph, quoted from someone older and calmer than the journalist, explaining what the word was actually meant to describe. Not a costume. Not a game. A deep, lasting, involuntary sense of being, inwardly, a particular animal, held by people who know perfectly well that their bodies are human.
I put the tablet face down. Then I went and stood at the back door for some time, looking at the field behind the house, which is what I have done all my life when something has startled me.
That was two years ago. I am a red deer, a hind, and I would like to write something for the people who come to this in the middle of their lives, because nearly everything I could find at the time had been written for the young.
Thirty years older than the word
The first thing I felt, once the startle had passed, was embarrassment, and I think it is worth being plain about it. I have a mortgage, a bad knee and two sons in their twenties. I spend my working days driving between reservoirs in hill country for a water company, checking gauges and fences and writing up what I find. By any outward measure I am a settled, sensible, middle-aged woman, and the vocabulary I had stumbled into seemed to belong to people the age of my sons' younger friends.
It does not, of course. When I went and read the history, I found that the word was in use the better part of thirty years before the short videos, and that the people who first used it in earnest are now my age or older. Some of them, I have since learned, are still quietly using it. But I did not know that at first, and I spent some weeks feeling like a woman who had walked into the wrong party and could not find her coat.
Rereading a life
When the embarrassment wore off, the real work began, and the real work was memory. I had read early on that memory is an eager assistant and will hand you whatever you seem to be looking for, so before I let myself read anything more I sat down and wrote out only what I could vouch for.
The list was not dramatic. I have always sat facing the door. I have never in my life been able to eat a proper meal at a sitting; I graze all day, a handful at a time, which my mother called picking and my husband calls my rounds. I am happiest at the edge of things, the edge of a wood or of a room, where I can see both ways at once. I startle at sudden movement so badly that my colleagues have learned to knock on my open door before they come in. When I was eleven I spent most of one summer lying in the long grass at the top of my grandparents' field, perfectly still, watching the hill, and could not have told anyone why.
None of that proves anything. Plenty of people are jumpy and eat between meals. What mattered was not any single item but the shape of the whole, and the fact that the shape had been there at eleven and at twenty-five and at forty, unchanged, while I explained each piece of it away separately. I had called it nerves. I had called it being a country child. I had once described it to a doctor as "being a bit on edge," and been told, kindly and correctly, that I seemed perfectly well. I was perfectly well. I was also, it turned out, a deer.
Revision is not failure
For a while I grieved the years I had not known. It seemed to me that I had lived most of my life in a house without knowing which room was mine, and I thought of the girl in the long grass and felt I had somehow let her down.
I do not think that now, and I want to say why, because I suspect this is where those of us who come to it late are most likely to get stuck.
First, I had not been living wrongly. I had been living as a deer the whole time, without the word. The edges, the grazing, the chair facing the door: I had arranged my life around them quite competently. What changed at forty-six was not what I was but what I could call it. A name is a great comfort, but its absence had not stopped the thing it names from going about its business.
Second, the middle of life is a time of revision for nearly everyone. I look at people my own age and see them taking up a faith or setting one down, leaving long marriages or finally settling into them, discovering that the work they chose at twenty-two was chosen by someone they no longer are. Nobody sensible calls this failure. We call it having enough life behind us to read it properly. A woman of forty-eight understands her childhood better than a girl of fifteen does, not worse. She has more of it to look at, and less need for it to flatter her.
Third, and most simply, you can only know a thing once the means of knowing it reach you. When I was eleven the word did not exist. When it did, it lived in places I had no reason to visit. It is not a failure of sight to miss a door in a building you never entered.
What the old hinds know
When I began to read properly about red deer, the dull and careful kind of reading, I came across something that has comforted me more than anything else. For most of the year the hinds and their young keep together, apart from the stags, and the group is commonly led not by the strongest animal but by an older hind: one who knows the way down to the sheltered ground when the weather turns, and where the grazing holds in a hard winter. As I understand it, the others follow her not because she is strong but because she has been there before.
I am not going to pretend this makes me wise. But it has made me less ashamed of arriving late. A deer is not lesser for being old. If anything she is more fully what she is, surer of the ground and harder to drive. I came to my word with forty-six years of knowing the ground already, and that, it turns out, is not a bad way to come to it. There are more of us hoofed ones than I had expected, too, and the page on hoofed theriotypes was a quiet pleasure to find.
If you have come to it late
A few things I have learned, offered for whatever they are worth.
Do not hurry, even though you may feel you have less time to waste. You have exactly as much time as the young, which is to say the rest of your life, and this is not a thing that improves for being rushed. The guide to awakening and questioning is as useful at fifty as at fifteen.
Do not feel you must take up the whole outward kit of it. I have no tail and no mask, and I will not be running on my hands along the reservoir path. My expression of it is that I drive the hill road a little earlier than I need to, stop the van where the deer come down to the water at first light, and sit with the engine off and watch them. They watch me. Nobody moves.
Tell one person, when you are ready. I told my sister, who was quiet for a while and then said, "You were always the one at the back of the photographs, looking at the hedge." I had not known she had noticed. People who have known you for forty years have usually seen more than you think, and some of them will be relieved to have a word for it too.
And be gentle with whoever you were before you knew. She was not lost. She was only, like a deer in the long grass, keeping very still until it was safe to stand up.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.