Wonderbringers Newsletter with Monica Parker
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Hello Wonderseekers!
Last week was Valentine’s Day. I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan. I find the whole thing so consumerist and pressurised and overwhelming (and pink). My husband and I don’t really celebrate it. Maybe the occasional card or an excuse to get some flowers (which we’ll find any excuse for), but we really try to express our love to each other in big and small ways all year long, so Valentine’s Day feels a bit redundant.
There are several different origin stories about Valentine’s Day. One is set in third-century Rome when Emperor Claudius II believed single men made better warriors. Supposedly, Valentine married them behind the emperor’s back and lost his head for the act. Another involves St. Valentine helping Christians escape Roman prisons, for which he was martyred. Yet another includes Valentine falling in love during his feats of bravery and sending a signed love note to his dearest (‘from your Valentine’) before his execution. The confusion is compounded by the fact that there are at least three different St. Valentines!
There is also a believed pagan connection, theorising Valentine’s Day was the Christianized version of Lupercalia, which had a tradition of young women placing their names in an urn and young men pulling a name out to find their mate (a marriage tombola of sorts). Alas, most likely, all of these were apocryphal, and it was Chaucer in his poem ‘Parliament of Fowls’ who popularised the romantic ideals of Valentine’s Day and February 14th.
In researching Valentine’s Day, however, I learned something new that shifted my perspective about the holiday. No, it won't make me want to go out and get some overpriced fixed-price meal or buy a heart-shaped box of candies, but it did make me think about the stories we are told and how claiming our own story can be a powerful tool for moving on from difficult times.
Forgive me if I’m late to this info but I discovered that iconic abolitionist, author and orator Frederick Douglass’s birthday is February 14th. But what’s fascinating is that Douglass chose that date for himself. Having been formerly enslaved in Maryland, Douglass was never told what his actual birthdate was. Years later, after he escaped to freedom, Douglass asked one of his previous slave owners, Captain Thomas Ault, if he had any record of Douglass’s birthdate. The best that Ault could offer was ‘February 1818’. Douglass lovingly recalled that his mother used to call him her ‘little valentine’, and so he selected Valentine's Day as his birthday.
For Douglass, celebrating a birthday was a profound statement of freedom and justice, having said, ‘Birthdays belong to free institutions. We, at the South, never knew them. We were born at times: harvest times, watermelon times, and generally hard times.’ It was a way for him to demarcate a shift from hard times to better times. A tool to craft a new identity that was wholly his and adopt his own origin story to move forward from the trauma of being enslaved.
I wonder if much of our suffering or confusion in life isn’t because of the stories we are told about ourselves by other people. Much like the muddled origins of Valentine’s Day, we don't always have a clear understanding of what happened to our family or us before we were fully cognizant of the world, so these stories become our self-concept or worldview, whether they ring true to us now or not. For example, my stepson always said when he was little, ‘I’m shy.’ Well, let me tell you, this kid is the furthest thing from shy. But it was something that he had been told about himself by a family member from a young age, and so he embodied it for a long time before coming into his own sense of self.
What part of your origin story no longer rings true? What narrative from your life would you like to rewrite and claim as your own? How can you do that now to rid yourself of an old identity or craft a new one?
Some wonderbringers for me this week:
A grief with no name: Identity is painfully contingent for the culturally bereaved.
Valentine’s Day isn’t about love: It’s about obligation.
The warning from Frederick Douglass: Why his ‘Sources of Danger to the Republic’ is so relevant today.
I’ll be speaking next month at Sharp’s Women's Health Conference, sharing the stage with the phenomenal Martha Beck! The theme is Recapture the Wonder — how fab is that? Let me know if you’ll be there! It is currently sold out, but you can join the waiting list here.
And just another reminder that I will be offering a vision boarding session in March that is free for Wonderbringers subscribers. I’ll share the date in next week’s newsletter and will be recording it for those who can’t join live. Get in touch if you want an invite.
With wonder,
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