some gifts up in y'all's lockers
In lieu of writing here today, I'm going to point you to my writing elsewhere—a rare treat these days! I got to write an essay for Madeleine L'Engle dot com (I know!) about A Wrinkle in Time and Ted Lasso (I know!!). It's about gifts and anger and flaws, and about what that book was doing in that show (which wasn't what I'd expected when it showed up).
“My faults!” Meg cries. I’ve always heard it as incredulous. How dare Mrs Whatsit not only make the gift something Meg already has—what kind of gift is that!—but also something so horrid. Her faults! The things that make Meg’s life so hard. The things about herself that she hates—the things that make her hate herself. They will turn out to be what lets her stay out of IT’s power.
That’s what I thought Ted was doing when he gave team captain Roy Kent a copy of A Wrinkle in Time. Roy’s gift, too, is his anger. In a later episode, Roy’s struggles on the field are astutely diagnosed: “It’s your anger. That’s your superpower … But that anger doesn’t come out anymore when you play. But it’s still in there. And I worry about what it’s gonna do to you if you keep it all to yourself.” Roy’s anger is a gift to him on the field, but only if he uses it there.
You can read the whole thing here. And if this is your jam, you may also enjoy the essay I wrote a few years ago for Electric Literature about Aunt Beast (where I started the thinking about Meg's faults that I found changing in context of Ted Lasso):
Aunt Beast loves Meg even when Meg is raging, and in doing so gives her the strength to go back to Camazotz, to return to the fight. Meg already had stubbornness, but that alone isn’t always enough to keep fighting.
More next week <3
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