Stag- or- The Importance of Going Solo

I have spent an extraordinary amount of money this season.  Some of it was necessary to spend but a significant amount I spent simply in some vain and desperate attempt to rebuild myself.  Remember those ghosts of mine?  They needed a new wardrobe.  I needed a new wardrobe.  I needed to make myself anew. I still do.  I still struggle with wanting to discard permanently relics from an upsetting time and replace them with delicious books or swank new corduroy pants... or stash those relics away, out of sight until I am stronger and wiser and much much calmer.  More appropriately able to handle them.

Don't worry, I am indeed long-windedly getting to a point of sorts.  The other day I splurged (again) on a tiny folding wallet- one of those you put an ID card and some cash in, shove it in your back pocket, and think 'sorted, I am streamlined.'  The reason I just couldn't help myself this time was the material.  The wallet has tiny silver stags all over it.  I am drawn to stags, amongst other wild creatures, and feel a strong desire to represent that a little more clearly and abruptly in my day-to-day comings and goings.  People should know- they should be a little more aware of the importance of wild things.

The point of the wallet and my musings?

When was the last time you saw a deer, a stag, and thought 'that's a wild creature'?  When is the last time any of us have stopped to really consider the meaning of domestication and domesticity?  Last fall, on a visit to my parents' house,  I watched an eight-point buck leap a six-foot fence with no running start. He just took flight into some unsuspecting suburbian's well-tended backyard.  An eight-point buck.  In the middle of Southside Charlotte, North Carolina.  Just using his incredibly powerful hind muscles.  That was no domestic creature.  That buck represented the wild things that we daily pretend are domestic but are in fact something else entirely.

Right now you are thinking... 'how exactly did we go from wallets to wild things?'

It's all part of this reclamation process of mine- which has admittedly had some setbacks of late- but I suppose all do.  I was a domestic creature for a little while.  I wore that label without fully understanding what it truly meant for my identity.  I disappeared.  I became routine and lost the identity that made me me.  Domestic animals are overlooked, in a way, by their frequency in our lives.  So while I became domestic to one person I became anomalous to everyone else, including myself in the end. I wasn't wild, as I have lamented in past blogs: in fact as I grew increasingly more domesticated I inversely and perversely grew increasingly less noticeable.

But becoming stag again, the solo version of Kate, has given me this strange opportunity to learn about myself again.  At a time when most people are settled into their identities as young execs, bank tellers, park rangers, mothers, wives, whatevers, I was a blank page.  I remain largely so because this process is necessarily slow, excruciatingly so.  I meet some new part of me, everyday.  There are days I don't like those parts that I meet- but they are mine and me so I take them.  For example- I can be a real bitch when I want to be.  But I can also admit to it.  Being stag lets me accept those things with much more grace and humility than I ever had before.

So there you have it.  The stag wallet.  I know, it's all so silly in my head.  Then again, I have never claimed to be anything but.

Until next time, Cheers Friends.