“Technically, I am not a witch as I have no formal witchcraft training or practice, but I do perform some sort of magic,” the other girl in the hooded cape tried to calm her down.
“You stole my face!” whimpered the girl pathetically as she mummified her head with her scarf. She was paralysed with fear, unable to run away from the source of danger she imagined, and started to choke for breath.
“You best represent my true self right now, while the other beasts are representations of my past self at different stages of life.”
Georgia Yilton the Mage
“The little beasts call me Mage that you probably have heard from them before,” the other girl smiled to herself and continued, “but other humans call me by my first name or initials direct.”
The girl was glaring daggers at her. “You’re Prince’s mage? And Bass’s? And Don’s? Bianca’s? Chococo’s? Rocky’s? Flora’s? Oh no, and Bulb’s?”
“Yes, and most of all, I am your mage.”
“What?!” screamed the girl for her life was about to turn inside out.
“How about we play a little paper-scissors-stone? If I win, you follow my instruction to reflect on your true self, one step at a time. If you win, I’ll send you back to Prince. Fair deal?” offered the mage.
The girl had seriously underestimated her opponent, thinking a small win with a bit of luck for once would suffice. In three consecutive losses, she was bound to answer the mage’s questions.
The mage started, “First, we need to find out the repressed experience that caused your denial. Why would you be afraid of who you are? Or why would you fear that others would reject you if you showed your true colours?”
The girl looked at the mage with undisguised contempt. It was deeply distressing to admit she was not the person she wanted to become. What if the mage tricked her into giving up her true self?
What was the true self and what was the false self?
“Don’t let others define you. Don’t let them confine you either,” reminded the mage.
The strength of denial shifted over time and the girl began to weep bitterly. She kept her eyes tightly closed and described the image in her mind aloud, “A caterpillar, rather gross, is stubby, tussock, and worm-like and it’s crawling and munching non-stop…” The girl was certainly overloaded and had reached crisis level.
“Oh sorry, my dear, I didn’t realise I drew your transitional features too real that disgusted you and eventually caused you to abandon yourself,” said the mage as her heart sank.
The girl, a magical creature indeed, might be pretentious in seeing herself in a human form instead of her true caterpillar shape, but she was not intentionally telling a conscious lie. She was habitually struggling to become something else but deep inside, she was not sure what that was. Denial was perhaps a coping mechanism with distressing situations. An initial short-term denial was used to transit and to adjust to emotional conflict, stress, and anxiety. But denial, no matter what, could have a dark side too when it was undetected for long in the everlasting blindness of her characters within.
The mage felt totally responsible for being insensitive and regretted not helping out with the girl’s struggle earlier. “Listen, a caterpillar is primed to transform into a radiant airborne fairy. The beautiful features of a butterfly remain dormant and the suppression is merely temporary. It is a scheduled development of which time is the key and quintessential ingredient. If you are brave enough to look again, you will see you are no longer crawling, and your wings can take you wherever you want. Not many magical creatures have wings. Flying is an in-born gift and requires some hard work to embrace it and figure out how to use it.”
“But if I ain’t Georgia Yilton, I’m nobody,” said the girl as tears were rolling in her eyes.
“Show yourself! You’re a heart after my own heart,” said the mage, “You best represent my true self right now, while the other beasts are representations of my past self at different stages of life. I still retain a fragment of those personality traits though.”
The girl stared at her in horror, lips trembling.
“We deny everything, we doubt ourselves, but when we start believing again…real soon…” the mage spoke to the girl as if she were also talking to herself.
Then like a movie, in a series of flashbacks to the girl’s experiences during her castle-chasing journey, the story was rewound to the beginning when she first met Prince on the InterCity Express train and retold from the girl’s perspective.
She remembered she always saw things from the eye level of her mage. While in Berlin, she could only recognize Prince as her counterpart. The harder she dug into vivid memories, the less of the puzzles remained. The beastie buddies were there from the very beginning. It was her dumbness in all senses to veil the reality.
Then she was thrilled to meet Bass in Potsdam. Bass taught her fellowship, commitment, and the rhythm of the adventure. He shared with her his most precious gift and took their first selfie together. She felt accepted, but her inbuilt denial kept her locked into the human image she made up for herself. She shut herself down from pain as well as the fullness of life.
Despite the illusion that detained her in the comfort zone, she could never forget the wonderful flying experience in Rathen. Under Bass’s step-by-step guidance, she leant to fly on Prince’s back while racing with Don. That was the first time she experienced the immense, long-dormant energies to breakthrough, to push against the imaginary boundary until wonderful things happened.
She was dragged to the race, but in the end, she decided to fly before she knew how to. She began to understand trotting and came up with her own slanted figure eight pattern with her wings. Everything magical took place in the heart, not the wings or the head.
Acceptance and surrender were inseparable. A change of mind could transform the strength to work within her instead of continuing to consume her. Then her abiding memory was filling in the details in a string of events to the awakening of the heart and most of all, was bringing things into being.