Breathe
By Pamela Cerdeira
I remember little of my childhood, but there are some scenes so vivid I could touch them; my mom giving me a collection of children's stories because I did well in swimming class is one of them. I devoured them. Although one in particular generated in me a mixture of fascination and morbid curiosity: The Match Girl, by Hans Christian Andersen. I couldn't understand how a children's story could have such a sad ending. Disney's sweetened versions of the classics spoke of death, but at the beginning of their stories, never at the end, the ending was always happy and with a prince by the side. But the matchseller, a girl a few years older than I was when I read it, died, and died of cold, there was no prince but her grandmother, or the image of her grandmother dead from starvation hallucination, and there was no single alternative ending to happen, and I marveled at that.
In my twenties I began reading Women Who Run with Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a psychoanalyst, poet, singer and keeper of ancient tales, as she describes herself in her book. She argues that "fairy tales, myths and stories provide interpretations that sharpen our vision and allow us to distinguish and rediscover the path laid out by wild nature. The teachings they contain instill confidence in us: the path is not over but continues to lead women towards ever-deeper self-knowledge. The Bluebeard chapter made me see my own "fairy tale" and Clarisa's explanation of the importance of following our intuition and seizing the moment to escape and return to ourselves turned my life around. A book that I did not finish reading, it saved me.
