07/14/2025
Recently, I became *REAL*
Like Velveteen Rabbit real!
Do you remember the childhood story? If not, let me refresh your memory. It is the tale of rabbit toy who was owned by a boy in England depicting his journey as a new toy to eventually becoming a very worn stuffed animal through all the love the boy gave him.
As a young girl in America, I, too, had a stuffed bunny like that. It was a Bugs Bunny replica, yet I named him Merlin. He was my magic friend that I clutched tightly sleeping next to nightly for many years. Eventually, he too, was let go of as I moved on to different interests.
I don’t remember precisely when it happened, but I have a faint recollection of his existence becoming “not cool enough” for the older persona I was seeking to embody. There was some transition in my development that occurred when I ceased to hold onto the comforting things if they no longer passed the test in my mind of what was acceptable to the outer world. I forsake the things I innocently loved in favor of what the world elevated. I began to self-abandon in order to present my mask to the world.
We all do this, do we not? Some of us worse than others in the sense that we go perhaps further with it and almost disappear.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
-Excerpt from my latest Substack on ART OF LIBERATION
“Birthday Smiles: Looking at life with the eyes of a child & the wisdom of the years”
Illustration by William Nicholson
