The Fjordhammer Project: Removing The Labels Of Hurt On A Journey Through Cornish Folklore - Joana Varanda
Removing The Labels Of Hurt On A Journey Through Cornish Folklore
*Trigger Warning* - Bullying, Family Abuse, Suicidal Ideation
It sounds like an exaggeration to say that at about three, going on four decades old I still don’t know who I am - but it’s true. I still don’t. Am I really a writer? A folklorist? I know that I like to write and that I like folklore, so why is it so hard to say that’s who I am? It’s hard because throughout my entire life whenever I said I was something, people did their very best to make me believe I was the opposite. And because I didn't know I was autistic, I believed them.
It’s easy to believe you’re something you’re not when you’re conditioned to accept other people’s opinions of yourself from a really young age too, especially if those opinions come from the people who are supposed to love you. Thus crybaby and spoiled brat became my first labels, given to me by my family because they didn't understand autism.
To cope with my loneliness and lack of affection, I taught myself to write when I was just four years old - filling entire notebooks with tales about friendship, acceptance and countryside life. Knowing how to read and write early would cause more problems than it solved though, as colleagues and teachers gave me more labels: know-it-all, show-off, smug. I grew so distant and invisible - suspecting these labels weren’t really me, but unequipped with the ability to know why - that I had to start playing the role of bullied kid at the back of the class who everyone goes to for help with homework, but no one wants to be friends with.
To survive the formative years of my life, I played along with other parts that people gave me, donning my masks of mean, sarcastic, and weird teenager that - surely - must be into all sorts of creepy things like vampires, goth bands and black eyeliner, right? Evidently, I got tired of pretending to be edgy, so I tried to change tactics and turned to comedy. That did not go as planned - what little friends I had soon labelled me their own private town fool, 'target of jokes' instead of ‘the joker'. I recall one of the last days I spent with them, at the beach. I'd walked away to play with the feeling of wet sand under my feet, overhearing them snigger - and placing bets whether I was going to drown myself or not.
And through it all, I continued to write. By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I wasn't doing too badly, publishing small comic book stories periodically, inspired by a developing interest: mystical tales from my hometown Sintra. I desperately wished to go to University, but my mother had abandoned me and taken all the money she could lay her hands on, including my University fund. I set my mind on studying in the UK, but no one around me believed I would be able to go through with it, so I began to arrange things in secret. Despite my perseverance, Luck was not on my side. The moment I announced I was leaving, my family cursed me, prophesying that I would drag my face through the mud and be back within a year. I lost four jobs, broke my wrist, and lived through the worst traumatic event of my life.
When I arrived in the UK, I tried to forget that event. I tried to make friends, tried to be involved with lots of projects, and I met someone special - the first person to suggest I was actually autistic. He too had received many labels throughout his life, and despite being so hurt, my heart told me I needed to give him the chance no one had ever wanted to give me. My “friends” hated that. I'd begun to cancel a lot of social events out of sheer exhaustion - early days of my autistic burnout and ME/CFS condition - and their conclusion was, of all things, that my boyfriend was abusing me. They tried to force me to break up with him, and when I didn’t, they blanked me and started gossiping about me. Hilarious. More labels.
Meanwhile, one of the illustrators who I collaborated with on my Portuguese comic books invited me to write a story about Cornwall. Missing the mysticism of Sintra, I decided to write about Cornish folklore and research the works of folklorists like William Bottrell. Reading about stone circles, mischievous piskies and knockers hiding in mines eating pasties, I unexpectedly found more than just raw material for our book: I found my true home. Our project went on to become the Men-an-Tol, winner of the Gorsedh Kernow Creativity Award in 2017 - and together with that special person who is now my husband, they made life worth living again.
By early 2020, I was fueled by love and folklore. I started participating in weekly hashtags like Folklore Thursday, Mythology Monday, Fairy Tale Tuesday. I interacted with other folklorists like Signe Maene, and soon, a group of us decided it was time to create more pages for the other days of the week. And thus, Superstition Saturday was born.
But that fuel was just masking something that had been going on deeper, longer, about to implode with a combination of factors: being forced to move away from my home in Cornwall; finding myself living in a pandemic that robbed me of further professional development (mostly hindered by employers that think being autistic means being irresponsible et al); burnout and the exacerbation of my ME/CFS symptoms; and a University colleague resurfacing into my notifications to call me liar and other worse labels after I publicly shared details of my trauma. Nothing that I did, or said, or tried to prove about myself mattered because I was the label that others had told them I was and there was nothing more to it. Again, and again and again and again, everyone imagining a 'me' without me.
Well, straw, meet camel’s back.
For the first time ever, I stopped writing. I put Superstition Saturday on hiatus right after it started and I couldn’t care less about folklore.
My old friends and family would have loved to find out about the many times I considered drowning since that day - the many times I attempted to end it all, face full of mud. Unlucky for them, one day I saw a quote, somewhere, as you do. Cringy, but, it said:
“Above the Temple of Delphi were the words Know Thyself, not Let Others Tell You Who You Are.”
Then, to know myself, I finally pursued an official autism diagnosis. I had nothing to lose. Turns out, the assessing team said it was so obvious that I only needed two appointments. Drowning in a sea of labels, here it was, the simple proof I had only ever needed one label to begin with: autistic.
The journey isn't over though, for I am learning that to confirm you’re autistic late in life comes with a considerable amount of grief. You grieve the person you were never allowed to be, and grieve the people who - when faced with the decision to look at you with kindness and support - treated you with cruelty instead. That's because in the theatre of their minds, people like to assign you a role. They imagine a ‘you’ without you to make their world fun and busy. But one day, if you tell them you don't want to play that role anymore, they resent you. How dare you not be the person who they thought you were all this time? Now they’re going to have to find someone else to hate. Or perhaps they will make everyone hate you instead.
To overcome this grief, I have to keep remembering a time before I was given any label - so I remember my grandfather and grandmother, everyday. I try to see myself through their eyes: before my family abused me, before my friends bullied me, before, before… Before I remembered the strange superstitions and stories my grandmother used to tell me, and the kindness and support I had from my grandfather. I had quite forgotten that I used to know myself through them, that folklore had been there through them, all along. So yes, maybe I am a writer, I am a folklorist. And I am autistic too. And I know now, with certainty, that when people try to give you labels without bothering to know who you really are: that says more about who they are than you. So keep going, and know thyself.
Thank you for sharing.
ReplyDelete