Collecting the bones

Last year, as my world crumbled and I began anew, I read a book that didn’t change me. People say books changed them; I’ve experienced that, too. But Women Who Run with the Wolves did not change me—it merely returned me to myself. It allowed me to see myself clearly for the first time. It was a long overdue homecoming, a requisite curriculum.

You’ve heard me speak of La Loba, La Que Sabe. She who gives life back to the dead wolf after collecting each of its bones, one by one. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the author of the book that did not change me, writes that our life’s work, as women, is to collect the bones we have lost and breathe life into them again. To deliver our wreckage to the bone woman, hands dirtied and callused and bleeding from the hard work of self-knowledge, and wait for her to sing her magic over us. To hear her laughter as she shakes her head and says, sweet child, wild woman, you’ve had this power all along. I am just showing you what you already know.

These bones we must collect are the lost fragments of soul; the elements of our deeper selves we bury out of survival, discard for belonging, or lose to circumstance, to patriarchy, to violence.

Estés writes, “The great work before us is to learn to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die. […] This womens’ labor of finding and singing the creation hymn is a solitary work, a work carried out in the desert of the psyche.”

The severing of my life in South Africa sent me to that desert. And when I first read of La Loba, I cried; I could be saved. I could be that wolf, brought back not from the brink of obliteration, but past the horizon of it. The Life/Death/Life cycle of which Estés spoke felt like an oath. A promise of new life. A promise of continued death; not one, but many, always, and a rebirth beyond.

But before I could beg for La Que Sabe’s song came the work of collecting my bones. Which required the answering of that all-important question: where did I lose them?

I’m sure I lost many bones—shards of soul—before memory became a tangible thing, a room I could visit. Conversations overheard too young to understand them; ways in which I adapted my wildness for affection and acceptance, before those words meant anything to me.

But the first bone I can remember losing was at ten, coming home from school in a fit of sobs, the harsh words of bullies like a cattle brand on my skin. It’s the first time I remember willing my body to change, shoving it with my fingers to try to make something better. If only my nose would be smaller, I’d be chosen. If only my teeth would straighten, my styes heal, my gangling body grow into itself—I’d belong.

I gave up another bone—perhaps the whole of my spine—when I learned to shift those bullies’ attentions elsewhere, towards another tall, insecure girl, too loud and too much like me. And then, when they had bored of her suffering and turned back in my direction, I pointed toward the soft girl, who wanted only to be loved. Her tears in the hallway, their laughter; my cruelty was self-preservation, but my eagerness surprised me.

Many of my bones, I lost to men. A femur, perhaps, to Andrew, crying on the floor of a New Orleans bathroom, shamed for doing something he had asked me to do. I surrendered a finger to Ryan, sitting in the grass of my college quad, begging him to choose me when he so clearly hungered for my best friend. Trapped under couch pillows, starved for air by the weight of my brother’s friends as a girl, laughing when I wanted to be screaming, I buried one there. Wedged it between the cushions.

A hip bone, my pelvis, to men I’ve let touch me who shouldn’t have.

I gave up a rib when I stopped eating at twenty. Running on that treadmill in my sorority house, I pulled bones from my skin if only to be smaller, to keep running, though hunger had made me weak. Each bite I counted, each minute I waited until it was noon and I was allowed my breakfast: a tooth, torn from its socket and weighed for value.

Watching my mother cry: a hundred bones, enough to build a ladder and pull us both out.

Wrist, clavicle, were lost to silence. The urge to keep the peace, or to stay invisible, so as not to be singled out. These bones were the hardest to find, slippery and shrewd, buried deep in memories painted over with the golden sheen of a happy childhood. Shrapnel festering beneath scar tissue. We all did our best; it was not enough.

A thousand moments over a lifetime. Capitulations, servility, swallowed rage, hot tears—the myriad of ways I have bent and cut and shoved myself to be safe, to be chosen, to be worthy.

It is every woman’s reality, even still.

The process of collecting one’s bones is hard work, strange and slow and grueling—but also invigorating and purposeful. Sometimes, to get my bone back, I merely had to step backwards in time and sit with that version of me and give her grace, to explain to her what was happening and how, someday, we’d do better. Other times, I found bones in unexpected places: a conversation with my mother-in-law in the front seat of her car delivered a bone from my teenage years; a greasy souvlaki on a Greek island returned to me a bone I’d left in an ice cream shop in Mexico; a new lover’s tender, soapy hand filled the vacancy of a bone he hadn’t stolen.

It is why I write: often, when lost in story, the glint of ivory is revealed to me, and I dig a bone free with my words.

My therapist has excavated more than I can count, a scalpel in deft hands and a belt between my teeth, dissecting them from the stories I held about myself, untruths I’d forged to protect my ego. Hers was bloody, vital work, and I am grateful.

Why do I tell of this now? Because I believe, finally, I have reclaimed my final bone. I will not tell you how; that is between La Loba and me. But I have dug the last of me free from the dirt, the muck, and—now a woman—I will ask of her: Sing over me, teach me the song. La Que Sabe, show me what you know.

I am ready. I am hopeful. I am sure. Because I have done what Estés demanded. I have sat by the fire and decided what creation hymn to sing, and now I will sing it over the bones of myself, loudly and without fear of those who listen.

But even then, when I am wolf once more, my work is unfinished. In fact, it is just beginning. Because what is a wolf without a pack? As Estés writes, “Our work is to show that we have been breathed upon—to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowing.” My work now is to help the women I love find what they have lost, by showing them what I have found.

I am La Que Sabe. And when their creation hymns have been sung, so too will they be. It is our birthright. It is our charge. It is the third act in the long play of Life/Death/Life.

To begin the careful work of reclaiming, you must only ask: where did you bury your bones, in desperation? I will not shame you, I will not ask you why—I already know. It is not my job to judge you for what you have done to stay alive, for I have done the same. It is only my job to send you to el río abajo río, to tell you of La Loba, to be the hands that hold the remains of the wolf pup you were as you dig yourself free from the clay of your hurt.

To urge you forward. To whisper Estés’ words in your pricked, furry ear:

“Sift the desert and see what you find. It is the only work we have to do.”