Like many people, I’ve saw the movie Wicked and I felt a resonance for how Elphaba was treated as a child and in Shiz University in how I’ve been trying to put my finger on how to describe our inner witch child’s experience.
One thing that can be tricky for people is to envision a concept that they can wrap their brain around and see themselves within the image to make the necessary connections to truly grasp the idea. Seeing Wicked (just the first movie so far) and how it impacted me helped me see the connection between how I treated my inner witch child compared to how Elphaba was treated growing up.
When Elphaba was little she wanted to make things special and magical for her little sister as well as protect her using her gifts. But due to her father’s feelings towards her and utter lack of support of any kind, she was embarrassed and ashamed of being different as well as her gifts. If her father had treated her gifts as exactly that — gifts — the petty and cruel comments from the others would have possibly had a buffer which could have made her more resilient when it came to how different she was.
It’s also apparent from the movie that she saw the world very differently from others around her. She believed in justice and kindness. Her compassion for others, especially the animals and how right it was that they could talk is something that I could feel as something almost forgotten within me which made me extremely sad to see myself in her belief in goodness and knowing that people she believed in and trusted turned against her and how she saw the world.
When looking at yourself, do you see and feel a connection to Elphaba and what she believed in and stood for?
Can you look within and see if you ended up internalizing those external voices of those who didn’t believe in your magical world view and your gifts? Did you internalize them in a way that you can still hear the voice of your relatives, friends, or those you looked up to telling you that you shouldn’t be who you are and that you should just see the world the way that they do so that everything would be easier for all involved (mainly them and their own discomfort)?
Or is your disconnection from your inner witch child something different all together? It might not have been as open and blatant as what Elphaba went through, but perhaps sour expressions made you feel you did something wrong when you explained your thoughts and feelings around something magical or some gift you expressed?
How do you see your inner witch child within you — something that you forgot about, but not hid away from judgment and cruelty from others or maybe something that you were just too shy to express without a deeper witch wound around it or maybe you do see Elphaba hidden away within you as a reflection of your own inner witch child?
