Trees · 4:07am Jul 11th, 2019
Let me start off by saying that human pack-bonding instincts are weird. They are this fascinatingly adaptable thing that allows us to bond with not only other people, but other animals and even objects. We care about our pets like members of our family (and they are members of our family, let’s be real), and there’s an attachment we get as humans to cars, boats, spaceships, and sometimes even places.
Which, from an attachment perspective, makes sense. We find ways to more thoroughly ingrain within ourselves the idea that this is our home. Our family. Our ship. It helps our anxious little monkey brains break things down into groups or family units. Even if we have moments where we don’t particularly like the people or things we’re around, they’re ours, darn it, and that’s important.
I think that’s why our attachment to objects and places becomes so prevalent in people who don’t have the most stable or reliable family units. Sometimes it’s what the object or place represents, but other times it’s what that thing becomes to us. More than simply a representation of an idea or feeling, but… a more than that which is often hard to describe.
As writers, this is important to note because it helps build up place as character. It’s hard to not care about a place or a spaceship or a particularly strange pet if we’re exposed to it so much. We get attached to that place, the ideas and hopes and dreams that it holds, and it becomes important to us. It’s the reason why people keenly felt the loss of the Defiant in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 just as keenly as they felt the loss of Jadzia Dax. Why the threat of the loss of the Glee club in Glee was this nebulous threat that runs throughout the entire series. And why everyone was heartbroken with Twilight Sparkle at the destruction of Golden Oaks Library. The feeling and meaning ascribed to those places and things was important enough to flip that little packbonding switch that makes us a little weird about how we relate to the world around us.
I had a particularly… distressing reaction to the destruction of Golden Oaks. Not just because I’m stupidly sensitive to other people’s feelings, and am really good at putting myself in their shoes. I mean, if you’ve watched the show through to the end of season 4, I feel most people on some level would have at least felt pangs of sympathy for her loss. But I just remember finishing the season finale and curling up in my bed and crying. My friends were asking me if I was okay on Skype and I just… wasn’t.
Which involves the story about a Maple Tree.
I mentioned earlier about how instability in family units can lead to attempts to bond with other things that give us… something. Some sort of attachment feeling even if it wasn’t reciprocated in necessarily the same way a human relationship would be. For me, familial instability was prevalent in 2000, because my mother was struggling with Major Depressive Disorder, my dad was working extra to make ends meet, and they were both frequently fighting. Fighting about… freaking everything. Finances. Me and my sister. My mom’s feelings of failure at being able to find a teaching job. Both parents stressing about her attempting to complete her master’s in Reading Education when money was alright rather tight.
Which, I really wish sometimes that my family was like the families on TV where screaming matches were commonplace, but my parent’s fights were always very intense discussions completed in low tones across the dinner table and largely followed up by hours or days of awkward silences in the house whenever the two were in the same room. I can only remember one instance where my parents shouted at each other, and while I count myself as lucky that my sister didn’t hear it, I did, and then spent the next few weeks wondering whether or not I needed to figure out how emancipation worked because if my folks got a divorce, I was going to tell them both to go fuck themselves and take my sister and leave.
I was a bit of an intense 12 year old, come to think of it.
Around this time, my mom shifted her way of coping (badly) with her depression from fighting with my dad to basically finding every way possible to inform me that my presence drove her nuts. Overnight it went from ‘oh god my parents are going to get a divorce’ to ‘I don’t know what I did, but clearly I am the worst.’ I don’t exactly remember what set her off, but I have a distinct memory of my mom just shouting at me when I got home from middle school, me deciding I had enough of it, and turning around and walking out the door.
We lived in the country at the time, down a small dirt road that contained about 5 houses and a dairy farm on a 1.25 mile length of road. I lived in the middle of a pair of cornfields, and when the movie Signs came out, had nightmares for months. But one of the features of the road was a line of trees that grew as a windbreak for the field across the road. One of them, a red maple, had branches that were low enough to climb. So climb I did. I hid there until my dad got home, then went inside hoping things would have calmed down. They didn’t, and I spent the next several months basically getting used to being sighed at, asked if I could go be somewhere else, and/or intermittently getting screamed at when my dad wasn’t home.
I started to get off the bus and go sit in the maple tree. Which I did even in the dead of winter. I got up there and would just… sit in the silence of the branches, even when there were no leaves because at least there it was quiet, and I didn’t have to deal with the emotional turmoil of being at home. That tree was my safe haven, and the place I could go to just get away if I needed to. And oddly enough, my folks never really could figure out where I went, even though it wasn’t more than 400’ from the house.
Things got better for my mom, and while I spent less time in the tree, it was still a haven for me when I needed to think. When I was struggling with depression and an eating disorder in high school, I would go to the tree to just… be alone. Probably not the healthiest coping skill, but I always felt better sitting up there, just listening to the wind in the leaves. I continued to do this on and off, even in my Freshman year of college. After having a really hard time one week, I came home for the weekend and just disappeared up into the tree to think. It was… good for me, and it gave me a little space to sort out the drama that was going on with people around me.
But as things are wont to do, the county finally decided after 160 years of being a dirt road that the road I lived on should be paved. I was away at college when this started, and didn’t think anything of it until I pulled onto the road as they were prepping to pave it, and the line of trees was gone. To this day I’m not sure why they ended up cutting them down. They were far back from the road, weren’t in the way of power lines (those were on the opposite side of the road from the trees), and considering they were making the road higher than the fields, I just… I don’t know. But one weekend the trees were there, the next weekend they were gone.
Which made for a very difficult conversation with my mother who, unfortunately, was home at the time when I discovered that the trees had been cut down. I wasn’t really sure how to explain to her exactly how much pent up rage and sorrow I had in that tree, and how losing it was like learning your house had burned down. And I really didn’t want to unpack all of the shit that caused that maple tree to be that space of solace for me with her.
Hell, ten years later and I still refuse to do so. To this day she still thinks she was the perfect mom to me, and that she failed my sister. My sister and I have spoken about this on occasion, and even my sister noted that, for all of her own behavioural issues, my mom was better to her than me. Which, you know, is FUn.
So the loss of Golden Oaks Library hit me like a truck, because it brought all that up again. It’s why when my friends recommended that I read Blink and Miss It, I was… less than pleased with them for a few days afterword. It hurt a lot, and struck a chord in me that I didn’t like being played.
And… it’s really weird to describe to people the amount of grief you can have for an object or a place when you lose it. Losing one’s home makes sense, but… objects are harder to describe to people who don’t struggle to attach to other… well, people.
But I think, from a storyteller’s perspective, knowing who or what a character attaches to says a lot about them. In Forgotten Friendship, one of the things that struck me about Wallflower Blush is how attached she was to her garden. It was this tiny, throwaway line in her very brief amount of dialogue that she had in the episode, but if you caught it, it told you a lot about her. Beyond her own anxiety about talking, she straight up struggles to connect to people. The memory stone was literally the best and worst thing for her, but I have a feeling that the next few weeks she had without it were hell.
I know we always have the tropes of the engineer who gets their machines more than they do people, but realistically, it’s grounded in reality. Or people who get along better with animals than they do people. Hellhound from Wildbow’s Worm is an excellent example of what happens when you struggle to make connections with people, and as a consequence stick to animals. It comes up as a major plot point several times, especially given the main character’s decisions throughout the webserial.
But I think our ability to do that is important. It helps us fill voids in our lives when the humans in them aren’t… really willing or able to fill them. And people aren’t perfect. Expecting perfection from them is silly and childish, but at the same time it doesn’t stop that from hurting when we do have to turn to our own stuff in order to figure out how to handle our emotions. Sometimes I think that’s the biggest impact that attachment has on people: helping us learn how to figure out our feelings in regards to other people. Or other things, as the case may be.
Because I don’t like ending things like talking about Golden Oaks (and… by extension, my own tree) on a down note, let me tell you about another attachment object of mine that I do still have.
One of the first stuffed animals I got was a little reindeer named Bambi. He wasn’t named Bambi when I got him, but after seeing the Disney movie as a kid, I named him that. He was my best buddy as a kid. We went through a lot of adventures, a lot of days sick in bed (I was frequently ill from ages 4-8), and lots of trips when my family had the money to travel. I had a few scares where I thought I’d lost him, but I always ended up getting him back in the end. Which, at one point, included getting him mailed back to Michigan from Florida by a very caring and patient hotel staff!
When I moved out to Oregon, I’d had to leave Bambi behind. I didn’t have much room, and a part of me was worried that I’d fail trying to live alone out in Oregon, so he was my way of saying ‘I’ll be back.’ When I returned home briefly in early 2016 to try to get my head together after some very trying years, there he was, waiting for me on my bookshelves that I had in my room. When I went back in early February, I ended up leaving him behind again. Which meant that my folks were to look after him, and my books that I still had in my childhood room. These were two very important things to me, and I made sure to stress to my folks that if they did anything with my old room, they were to make sure that my books and Bambi were safe.
My folks rearranged my room because my mom now runs a very successful air B&B out of my family home, and I’m super happy for her. But Bambi needed to come with me to Oregon. When I was home, collecting things to mail back to myself, Bambi was one of the objects that I knew wasn’t going to get left behind.
Except my mom misplaced him. I spent a frantic two hours tearing through the house, trying to find where she may have put him. He ended up being in the last place I looked, along with my two build-a-bear ponies of Rainbow and Fluttershy. Now, I’m 30 years old, but the relief I felt at finding this childhood attachment object was overwhelming. He may be an old, well loved little stuffed reindeer, but he’s my little well loved deer, damnit. Today he sits next to my computer on my bookshelf, right above my beloved copies of Fallout Equestria, Background Pony, and The Journal of The Two Sisters. I probably need to give him some love and repaint his eyes, but he's my little friend who still watches over me. And that's important.
I was never really in one place long enough to have a place like that, though I really wish I had had one. Families are wack.
I completely understand about your tree and about your reindeer friend. I never connected well with my parents or brother. When my father retired from the Navy and we moved to a small farm in Texas, I found some solace in being outside working. Eventually, I started exploring the areas around our place and found a few places that I went to often just to get away from all the ridicule and emotional and mental pain. I also had a horse. He was a paint horse and I spent almost all my time with him. It seemed as though we needed each other. He was literally the only real friend I had, even though I did have one friend people in high school Eventually, I graduated and went to a vocational school about an hour away. I came back on weekends to help around the place, but mostly to visit my horse. Then one weekend, I had to go somewhere with my parents. When I got back to the farm, my brothers dog had gotten loose and chased the horse. The horse tired to jump a fence but became tangled up and was seriously injured. A neighbor had come by while we were gone, tied up the dog but couldn't save my horse. I called a vet but nothing could be done and I held his head as the vet put him down. I haven't thought of that in years, Heartshine. I bring it up just to say I understand about losing something that was always there for you when you needed it. Time heals, I suppose, but the empty spot is always there, even if we fine something or someone to replace them. The memories are always with us. Sometimes that hurts, but most of the time, I think we remember the best times, and that makes it okay.
Be sure to keep Bambi close. And thank you for sharing your story. It makes me feel a bit more normal now. *Hugs*
I hated that they killed the treebrary (and replaced it with that sterile monstrosity). It really did feel like a character death.
...Is that an Ambassador-class starship I see keeping Bambi company?
Thank you for sharing your stories with us.
While I can't say that I have emotional attachment to a tree like you did, since the worst part of my family dynamic is my high-functioning brother, and my maternal grandmother who lives 14 hours away driving mom nuts, when we see her and grandpa, I can relate to that shit. You have Bambi, I have Puppy, who is literally older than me, by about two weeks, and Harry Mclary From Donaldson's Dairy, one of those thick, cardboard pages children's books. And there's Blackie, my dog, who's starting to get kinda old (he's 7), but he's our "failed adoption" since he was part of a litter of nine from a rescue Blue Healer named Gracy we fostered. I love that dog
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Yeah, that's the Enterprise-C! I need to paint her, but she's been a side project I've had for a while. The decals that came with the original model just... didn't do it justice.
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If anything, I like to try to normalize experiences that people have. I remember having a conversation on the fallout equestria server about stuffed animals we had and transitional objects. Those are those things that you give you to kids to provide psychological comfort. Bambi is one of them. Our pets can be others. That conversation led to people reminiscing about childhood toys we had (or didn't have in some cases), and... may have led me to spending close to $300 to send people pony plushies because I think that there's some value in having them, even as adults. Often time in adulthood, those comfort objects switch from stuffies and blankets to photos, music, maybe art made by family members or your kids. But I think they're really important to have, but it's not something we talk about a lot, and as a consequence, people feel a little weird when they have a profound attachment to an item of theirs because it makes them feel a little better.
But that's totally normal. It's just something that's not brought up a lot.
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I very much agree! I have all the Mane 6 and Luna and Celestia, along with Derpy and Raven Inkwell. They sleep on one side of the bed and occupy the pillows during the rest of the day. They each and all together have been a huge source of comfort on some very dark days and always remind me of the lessons from their world.
But that attachment also extends to friendships I've made in the fandom. I'm closer to most of my friends here than I am with family members. I can't remember when I've been that connected to people and it gives me a great sense of comfort and confidence that I didn't have for a long time.
Your stories always have a little something for us readers to think about and learn. It's also great to see the stories that it prompts others to type out for the rest of us to read.
Many Christmas' ago, when I asked my dad what he would like, he responded, "A new truck. A white one." At the time, we were a family of 5 and swapped between using his city police vehicle and a two-door Geo Metro (anyone remember those sardine cans?) to shuttle us around town. We later replaced the Metro, but my dad still didn't have a truck of his own. It took one trip to the hobby store to get a Matchbox toy truck and a bottle of white enamel paint, and an afternoon of modifying and painting the toy to get it to look like the model he wanted. He kept that little toy at his office desk for years. Then, when I got out of college was struggling to keep my Pontiac Sunfire going, I gave him the same answer he gave me when he asked what I wanted. I wasn't able to go home for the holidays that year, but a small package showed up at my barracks room. It was the toy truck I'd painted years ago. Ever since then, that truck has traveled with me across the globe, and it currently sits on a shelf next to all my challenge coins.
There's a little piece of someone, some feeling, or some spirit or essence that lives inside these objects that we hold onto for all long as we can. And that's a weird, confusing, and completely delightful part of being a person.
Now this is interesting...
In fact, it vaguely reminds me of an anecdote regarding sensory-deprivation. For instance, I encountered it once when reading about a beaver's dam-building behaviour. I forget the context, but a beaver enclosed in a featureless cell of a room spontaneously went through the motion of cutting down trees and piling the logs up despite there being no trees, wood, or river present. Almost like it was imagining they were there anyway.
Our species does it too. Humans who are put in sensory-deprivation tanks don't see nothing; they start hallucinating, possibly because the brain not only expects but demands certain features in the environment (or indeed, demands an environment at all). That suggests that some things are so fundamental to a mind that it doesn't need to wait and painstakingly learn what is and is not the case; it'll assume they're there as a matter of course.
Couple that with the idea that humans do not just depend on other humans but existentially depend on them, and building social and emotional attachments even to inanimate objects makes a kind of sense from a biological perspective. In the same way, the design of a bird's wing makes sense when you know about the air it's meant to glide through, even if it's not flying right now.
Perhaps for humans, the urge to socialize is like the urge to fly or to build dams; it's just that powerful, and the presence of other people is so fundamental that the mind will "hallucinate" or think them into existence. Imaginary people, fictional people, and imaginary friends included.
What's more, those non-human substitutes have a few major advantages over actual people. Firstly, they're controllable, and so manageable, compared with other people's capricious emotions and complex thoughts. Secondly, they don't usually hurt. People break up, have arguments, fall out, insult, victimize, and do worse things to each other. By comparison, a harmless stuffed toy provides a solid, stable foundation. Even if it can't offer the best of what a fellow human can, it can't offer their worst either. And thirdly, they can be helpful as a kind of free therapy, if all you want is something to talk to. They don't interrupt or give advice you never asked for, and they're as patient and untroublesome as you imagine them to be. That's a good reason to indulge them.
I don't think it's weird. If anything, it makes good biological and psychological sense to exercise the old "socializing" muscles regardless, and not just for times when human society is... well, unsatisfactory. It can also enrich the experiences of a "normal" human being, if used well.
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"a two-door Geo Metro (anyone remember those sardine cans?)"
Hah, yes, my family had one for a while! :D
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I was going to just say this to Heart, but I think this might help you all, for what little my words matter.
I can't really say I know what you're talking about. When I was a kid, my parents made it clear: anything I loved, cared, or grew attached could, and more then likely, would be taken away, destroyed, or given away, so i conditioned myself not to grow to attached to anything. Nothing was permanent, so when the inevitable punishment, or simply vindictive act came, I wouldn't be bothered by it.
But I do know that people do get upset about these kind of things, and I do try in my own life not to be so careless or dismissive. I won't say to you dear heart "it was just a tree" or "you could have gotten another deer" or anything of that nature. But I suppose... I do envy you. Its a wonderful thing, this broken hearted way of yours.
I don't know what it means to be "normal, but please, hang on to this Heart. And don't let anyone tell you these feelings are silly or try to guilt you over them.
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We like to know we aren't alone, are heard, and matter, even if its make believe.
And sometimes, a lie is all we have. A man once declared himself Emperor of America to escape the misery of his existence. His lie did not become truth, this was no Puss in boots. But the lie did become his life. He found support and care through. He sought solace in his madness, one could say.
He died in the rain, alone and cold. No one there to hear his last words, no one to mourn him. But he died as the First, and Last, crowned Emperor of the United States of America. So, in the end, his "hallucination" became reality.
Few people could claim the same, no?