Forbidden Fruits and Sins Against Capitalism

Forbidden fruits make juicy stories, and sins against end-stage capitalism are satisfying. Remember being a little kid and having creative goals and interests that had nothing to do with monetizing? Now that I'm a real grownup who has to work to live but doesn't want to live to work, writing literary novels with settings and themes outside of what big publishers are buying and selling, then donating them to libraries and selling copies slowly, by hand, to only those who understand their value, makes me feel a little bit like that untarnished kid again.

I think I speak for most millennial Americans when I say that I was raised in a culture that taught me to measure human worth by net worth and to measure the value of work by its wage and no other accounting of value. Thus the people who care for our children and nourish us with sustenance are disposable, while slimy CEOs and dead-eyed, half-plastic celebrities achieve a sainted status. 

Money has become our culture's false idol, so it feels right to sin against it by cultivating the sweet flavors of: 

🍎 pride in unmarketable values and skills such as authentic caregiving, kindness, quiet wisdom, and artistic integrity; 

🍎 greed for justice; 
🍎 lust for bodily autonomy, health, and wellness; 
🍎 covetousness for the confidence of a mediocre white man; 
🍎 gluttony for long, wholesome mealtimes with loved ones; 
🍎 rage against the kyriarchy; and 
🍎 satisfying rest.

I was an '80s baby, but from my earliest memories I balked at the tackiness of late 20th century popular culture, its ugly and artificial fashions, its obsession with empty status symbols, its glamorization of hustle and self-centered "self-improvements," and especially its godawful hideous hairstyles made with skin-singeing curling irons and stinky sprays. 

From early childhood to my thrift-shopping teen years, I preferred the outdated, soft clothing and acoustic folk music of the '60s and '70s. I liked long, natural hair and and rugged wilderness and worn, used books. My favorite romantic Disney animated film was Robin Hood, the one with the foxes that started the whole furry thing, the one in which the pampered but distressingly cloistered damsel runs off and marries her childhood crush, a hairy-chested and incorrigible bum who lives rough in the woods and makes her an engagement ring out of a flower.

My number one wish was to someday be a wife as beloved and down for adventure as Maid Marian, a nurturing mother, a baker of warm cookies, a woman who lived her own personal life instead of paying other people to take care of her home and family so she could spend all her waking hours selling her time and talents in exchange for cash in a cold, gray office building. 

Even as a little kid, I never fantasized about being one of those fairy tale princesses who ended up married to one of those boring princes whose only personality trait is "rich" and had to have her hair curled and her puffy sleeves on every day.

In my imaginary play, I was barefoot in a cottage in the woods. I liked the beast better than the French fop bonbon guy transformed by tears of pity. I preferred fins to legs. I never dreamed of attending royal balls, but I would have appreciated a dress made by mice and birds, and I would have worn it to climb out of the window and seduce a hot farrier or a sneaky stable boy or, what the hell, a whole set of strong and devoted little working men.

I longed for adventure more than luxury. I wanted love more than status. I wanted to write and live out my own stories, not corporate fantasies or the frustrated dreams of sad and stunted forebears.

Unfortunately, I was labeled "smart." 

And smart girls do not fantasize about disappearing into the woods with foxy rebels. 

Smart girls get straight As, and if they don't, they get the laziness and evil punished out of them because smart girls do not make mistakes by accident.

Smart girls grow up to become girlbosses, because low-status labor (especially of love) is a waste of IQ points and earnings potential as well as a betrayal of the second-wave feminists who forgot that Gloria Steinem enjoyed her own youth and beauty and love of passionate men, that she was great for exercising her free will toward her own authentic desires, not for imposing her will on other women.

Smart girls with any potential for greatness must emulate patriarchal men, the way Simone de Beauvoir was trained like a dog to do.

Smart girls do not prioritize relationships, because in the land of End-Stage Capitalism, people either exploit or get exploited, and love is a delusion that placates the stupid.

Teachers, friends, family members, family friends, and rando bystanders of all kinds saw my "potential" as I grew up and felt compelled, by the equal forces of their hopes for me and their unconquerable fear of actual female freedom, to shackle me with their own dreams and unmet needs, which I suppose they felt powerless to achieve on their own because they were not blessed with my "potential" made of youth and awe-inspiring standardized test scores.

We know now that the only thing that sets the "gifted and talented" set apart in adulthood is a higher incidence of mental illness, not any greater likelihood of riches or fame or political power. And it's no wonder, based on how we were treated by the community, as economic and social resources rather than people whose feelings mattered.

In my childhood, everybody around me had different ideas about what I was destined to do or become. Of course, many wanted me to become rich or famous so that they could share the glow. My classmates asked me for autographs in elementary school, to be kept like investments until I became famous someday. Older people, feeling themselves fade next to lights like mine, wished for me to set an example of fundamentalist Christian values by demonstrating that smart girls (which we can no longer suppress) can be strong enough to wrangle their fancy minds into submission and still become obedient handmaidens to their priests, fathers, and husbands, because an intelligent female mind is a valuable but dangerous thing and a woman's only true value is the reproductive capacity of her body to spit out more obedient Christian women to serve their slavish Christian men.

I entered academia and was cast into the shadows of Official Smart Women who declared that my brain mattered as much as a man's brain, or more! It mattered more than my body too. They instructed that to value my body's health, wellness, and natural desires could only be a vain or perverted betrayal of my sacred feminine intellect. How dare I fatten at the cafeteria, or strengthen in the gym, or seek love from men, when I could be studying with other Smart Women? Some wanted to incubate a radical feminist separatist, to not only refuse to obey but to spurn men altogether and take a vow of celibacy or, better yet, turn lesbian. Various overly invested bystanders felt entitled to other and conflicting expectations of me, to grow into a hyper-hustling glass ceiling smasher, or an award-winning artist, or an easy victim, or the second coming of second wave feminism, or a lifelong scholar, or an obedient worker drone, or a Stepford wife, or an athlete, or an entrepreneur, or the proud resident of a McMansion park, or a dead girl. 

Anything but a woman free to love what and whom I naturally loved and to freely choose what to do with my own body and mind!

I was a sensitive, emotionally intelligent, deeply compassionate and meaning-seeking kid with creative abilities, a strong work ethic, and terrible self-esteem deformed by emotional parentification, so people intuited correctly that it would be easier for them to control me than to get their own stuff together.

Lucky, they hissed, which means, undeserving. Which means, you owe us. They offered penances to atone for my unfair advantages. I did turn out to be lucky, though, because unlike many girls of my type, I figured out early on that I had developed into a tempting treat for the manipulative and narcissistic. I learned how to spot red flags and how to slam the door on emotional parasites who weren't truly on my team and didn't truly share my values. I learned that I was, in some important ways, in fact better than they were, that my luck was a grace bestowed upon me and not them, perhaps for good reason, and that I should keep quiet about it so that I could decide how to use it without unhelpful distraction.

By my senior year in college, I felt old and world-weary and wise. At a young age, I had learned not to take the advice of the miserable or the envious. I learned to watch how people lived before listening to what they said. I learned that the wisest people do not often give advice without being asked, while the dullest and least honest people are sometimes the most loud and charismatic.

I learned that nobody has all the answers, especially not the people who act like they do, and that the only expert in yourself is yourself. I learned that primal desire is not a choice, it is a garden of seeds planted in your soul before you are born, and that you can either tend to it--prune it, water it, feed it, weed it--or ignore it and suffer the consequences of barrenness, overgrowth, or abandonment to someone else's designs.

I made a conscious decision to practice disappointing my wolves-in-wool antagonists. It wasn't easy, but I burned some bridges (and continue to do so as needed) to bravely guard the space in my heart, mind, and calendar for those who are able to multiply my gifts of love and passion rather than consume them to depletion. 

As a teen, I started quitting things that I didn't want to do anymore, including my family's religion.

I chose the most expensive and challenging college in the land and studied liberal arts, because I was young and hungry to learn what was important, profitable or not.

I didn't always pretend to agree that my teachers were right about things when they weren't, because I was there to push the limits of knowledge, not to kiss butt and network with jaded oldsters.

I practiced hard at things I had no talent in and which would be of no use on a resume, because the challenges felt good and al dente between my teeth and I could feel how they grew my heart and soul and body.

I took risks and traveled to faraway places for no reason other than the beauty of their languages or the liveliness of their people, because it made me feel more human and awake.

I dropped out of graduate school even though I was doing so well I was mentoring other students, and I dedicated myself to nonprofit work, because I knew that making a difference would always feel better than making an extra buck and then agonizing over where to donate it.

I knew that I had made the right choice because the nightmares stopped, the ones about being a prisoner in a cage on a fast-moving train, watching beautiful natural scenery pass by and knowing I could never stop or get off the track to enjoy it.

I married a smart and wise and old-souled man who understood and loved me for all that I was. And I understood and loved him for all that he was, a beastly hairy blue collar laborer who had dropped out of his own prestigious and expensive school and had learned to take mental health, his own and others,' seriously by learning things the hard way, the real way.

We got the inside scoop on the Lansing, Michigan housing market and bought a decent house in a nice neighborhood for cheap, took in roommates until we could afford the mortgage ourselves, refinanced a couple times, and raised a brilliant daughter whose own thoughts, feelings, and wishes we love and respect, especially when they are different from ours.

Sometimes we feel like bandits, "getting away with" living a normie life in our disguises of mediocrity, sinfully wasting our gifts and talents on creating the life we "selfishly" want for ourselves and our child.

the morning view from my front porch

We designed our financial stability around minimizing our cost of living rather than hustling to earn and spend maximally. We are proud of our excellent credit scores and minimal debts. We are proud of our abilities to DIY and barter and figure out how to do without. We are gradually turning our little normie ranch in our little normie neighborhood into a custom-made fairy tale cabin, disappearing into a blooming garden of fruit and nut trees, vines and shrubs and groundcovers and flowers. It seems impossible, but we have achieved the as-seen-on-TV American dream of living a beautiful lifestyle funded by lower-income jobs that feel meaningful and enjoyable to us. We "get to" do this and to provide our daughter with a more peaceful, safe, healthy, happy, and even luxurious childhood than either of us experienced, because we were lucky enough to figure out that if we're so much smarter than everybody else, maybe we should do things our way and not crowdsource life advice from the pea-brain gallery.

All of this investment in my own authentic values, intelligence, and motivations, as well as my careful attention to learning from those I should admire, and not necessarily those admired by the masses or by themselves, has made me into a darn good literary novelist, if I do say so myself. 

I have spent my gifts and talents on writing two beautiful books, a Robin Hood story in a Byzantine setting and a fantasy tale of a princess plagued by irrepressible desires that bust through her like water through a dam, birthing a new era of horrors and hopes for her kingdom.  

I have little interest in navigating the politics and economic disasters of the current publishing industry, so I released my novels independently, in satisfying hardcover editions as well as ebook formats, and donated them to libraries. I refused to release a single edition through that one yucky billionaire's monopoly company, so my books are virtually excluded from its algorithmic "merit" system. 

I did make them available for sale, though, for those who know me or those who seek wilder and more stimulating novels with less traveled settings, and I only market them in ways that are enjoyable to me, such as hosting surprisingly fun and well-attended book talks and signings in my hometown, for about a year after publication.

After all this, I still feel lingering guilt and shame at pursuing goals and desires that aren't designed to result in wealth or status (thereby letting down all the suckers who have ever pinned their hopes on my trail of gold stars), but I can't help that I have always loved a good story.

And good stories all have high-stakes conflict in them.

A "good life" is like a good story too, at least for those of us who relish an adventure. A good life isn't always easy or nice. There are many ways to live out an authentic and fulfilling human lifespan on this earth. In life and on the page, I love a healthy challenge. I love experiencing a wide range and depth of sensations. I delight in rising above the lies of materialism and tasting the bittersweet fruits of radical resistance.

If you have enjoyed this post and you love a good story too, as well as damning The Man, scroll down to shop juicy books that I recommend using Bookshop.org, a life-sustaining alternative to that other billionaire-bloating site. Bookshop partners with local bricks-and-mortar bookstores to share profits, and shopping my books through my own affiliate link is the best way to support me as the author with an online purchase. Happy, happy reading.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

-Louise Erdrich, from The Painted Drum

Aven can make anything seem like a joke or a game. I chase him into the woods and forget everything for a short time. I forget the dragon ship. I forget my hair, and I get burrs caught in it. Aven has to help me pick them out.

We don't come back until the horrid smell of our supper taints the air. 

When we are all squatting around the fire, nibbling our gritty cakes of acorn meal and goose fat, Tata starts seasoning our supper with his grains of wisdom. "Don't look back, that's what the elders say."

Aven's gaze slides to meet mine through the ripples of heat unfurling from the flames. Tata goes on and on, thinning out the quotes of ancient philosophers with dribbles of genius gleaned from the traders and blacksmiths and peat cutters he's met here and there. He finishes: "Better to eat a crust of bread in peace than to feast amidst chaos."

But his words, like this meal, only make us hungrier. Inside our bellies, thunder.

-Jean Michelle Miernik, from Leirah and the Wild Man

Hildegard shook her head. "Rosemary told me yesterday that Johann is my dream husband, not hers. I do feel as though I've wished him upon her as if I could live through her." She glanced at Gustav. "Maybe she's right. I've been consumed by a selfish desire to lie with a man as fair as myself before I grow old. It's wicked, but I can't help it. And now I've pushed it upon my daughter at a terrible cost."

Gustav rubbed his forehead, frustrated by the complicated worries of beautiful women. "Is your Captain Stepan not fair enough for you?"

"He is, yes." She bit the edge of a fingernail, and the gesture reminded him of Rosemary. 

This gave him pause. Was Bellynda right about the girl after all? Did she act so nervous around him not because she was afraid or disgusted but--

"I adore Stepan," Hildegard confessed, "but he has done nothing more than flirt with me."

Gustav rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. "I didn't come here to insult you, but I must. Both of the men of your house have rocks for brains."

"Well, not even Rosemary and I can please every man."

"Listen, when I don't bed a gorgeous woman, it's not because she displeases me. It's because I'm married, and--and I'm ugly as a half-shaved bear. I don't want a woman to put up with me just because I'm the king, but Johann and Stepan don't have that excuse. Stepan, he's--obsessed with honoring the memory of Eginhard, right? Maybe he's afraid to offend you. Hey, speak of the dunce." He caught a glimpse of the captain skulking through the Grove of Thorismud. "Look at that sorry little man taking a stroll in the orchard all by himself. What in hellfire is wrong with him?"

"Gustav, hush, please. What if he hears you?" Hildegard grabbed his forearm, and a fire of desperation gleamed from her wide, blue eyes. Her cheeks flushed, her lips parted, and the breeze from the window tugged a golden curl against her cheekbone. 

"Hildegard, you look like the devil's own temptation in this dying light. No man could possibly resist you right now."

He half-hoped she would test him.

Her eyes widened until she looked positively crazed. "I'm going down."

Gustav laughed. "Best of luck to you, not that you'll need it."

With a whip of her braid, she vanished down the stairs.

Gustav put his face into his hands and breathed. Then he took himself down the stairs, slow and careful on his clumsy feet. 

In the great hall, little Rosemary and her maid Ennelyn sat on a straw tick in the corner, embroidering. "Seen the bishop today?" Gustav grunted.

Rosemary shrugged. "He has so much work to do."

Gustav stared at her, and she stared back at him, pain in her enormous blue eyes gleaming like a shield. As he turned to leave, he could not help muttering, "What a holy fool."

"Excuse me?"

He looked back. Rosemary's tone had not so much expressed outrage as begged him to elaborate. Her face brightened into a bloodthirsty smile. He realized this was the first time she had sustained eye contact with him since Midsummer Night. "What was that you said?"

Gustav shook his head and kept walking toward the door. "If I were a young and handsome man..."

He entered the rose arbor, and behind him he heard Rosemary say to her maid with aggressive insincerity, "Oh my, I do hope you won't repeat that to the bishop."

Gustav smiled bitterly. How could his young kinsman take his wife for granted so cruelly? Had he never felt unwanted? Probably not. He was young and foolish.

Not like Captain Stepan, a mature man who had been ugly once, from what they said.

Gustav understood what Hildegard had meant about wishing to live through someone else--he felt a bestial urge to witness someone else obtaining what he could not enjoy himself.

The scent of the Grove confused him at first, because the entire place smelled so weirdly of Hildegard after a few glasses of wine. But then he caught the sound of her voice and crept through the shadows.

"I don't believe it, do you?" He saw her in a pool of golden light, holding an apple to her mouth, its skin as fiery as a dragon's egg. "Nothing is truly impossible to resist, is it?" She opened her jaw and let her teeth graze the forbidden fruit.

"You wouldn't." Stepan stood a few paces downhill, partly turned away as though he might run, and the shadows on his eyes indicated horror. "I told you, stop this."

Hildegard bit, and Gustav flinched at the snap of the apple's ripe flesh. He tensed, ready to leap out and wrestle her to the ground if she went mad and Stepan was too stupid to do it himself.

But she only stood there, chewing thoughtfully, and slowly her head tipped back, and her eyelids dropped. Her breasts heaved with a deep breath, and the apple fell from her long fingers onto the ground, toward Stepan, and the captain moved his foot to avoid touching it.

Hildegard moaned, and she untied the ribbon that fastened her braid. Her fingers kept moving, through her hair and over her dress. She took a step, and her girdle with its priceless charms fell to the earth among windfalls and weeds. Her shoulders and hips and hands unmoored every slip of cloth on her body until it all dropped away, and she stepped even out of her slippers and stood naked as Eve before Stepan.

And he glared at her, his arms crossed.

"Stepan." She put her hands on his hard face. "Taste it on my lips, and you will know what you want."

-Jean Michelle Miernik, from The Grove of Thorismud

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