Week 5 & 6: On All the Themes I Can't Let Go

Why do my life and my fiction keep revolving around the same scenarios?

Words written: 2134

Dollars made: 0

Number of unfinished short stories: 7

I once heard it said that life puts the same obstacle in your way until you’ve learned the lesson you were supposed to draw from it. I believe it’s true that we keep repeating our mistakes if we don’t learn from them, and I’ve made plenty of mistakes in the past twelve months to learn from. So when the call came and I was finally (finally!) offered a job, I turned the offer down. Something deep down inside me whispered: “This feels just like the job that broke us in January. Can’t you feel it? The strange interview questions, tasks omitted from the job description… This is wrong. All wrong.”

Turning a job down is scary, especially when it offers the security and stability my mental health needs. But this situation was an exact copy of the situation in October 2023, when I chose the job that felt terribly wrong over a longer search for a job that felt right. It was one of the obstacles life put in my way again to see if I’d learned. I like to think I did, but was frustrated to find myself in the exact same position as ten months ago. Trying to flee from my frustration and hide behind fiction, I realized that I do the exact same thing to the characters in my short stories. Going over the stories I’ve written in the past year and a half, I quickly noticed my “obsession themes”, the ones I keep coming back to. But while the universe keeps putting me in the same scenario in order to teach me a life lesson, I put my characters in similar scenerios to figure out what makes people tick. Although there are more opportunities in non-fiction, I am also working towards the goal of seeing my fiction published. If you decide to stick around until then, which I hope you’ll do, be ready to dive into these themes in my short fiction.

When I visited Mexico earlier this year, my interest in human sacrifice became a running joke in our tour group. I didn’t even realize it at the time, but it fit the theme of at least three of the stories I’ve written in the past year: Sacrifice. How far are we willing to go to protect those we love in an act of self-sacrifice? How much value does a human life hold as a sacrifice to forces too grand for us to comprehend? Can we pay our debts and dues with our lives, or that of someone else? I’ve written about grandmothers sacrificing their granddaughters’ souls, about friends sacrificing their lives for each other, sacrifice to appease the gods of ancient lands, and still I keep returning to this theme. How much value does a human life hold when faced with the unknown? I haven’t found an answer yet, so I’ll keep writing.

Intertwined with my fascination for sacrifice is the theme of Western arrogance. My characters often find themselves in situations or territories where they don’t belong, but have forcefully gained access to anyway. It’s the process of colonization and decolonization in a pressure cooker: Why does the Western mind think it is entitled to access to certain spaces, and why does it neglect the history and culture of those spaces after gaining access? I extensively studied (formerly) colonized territories through the lense of linguistics, but I’ve never found a good reason why, other than indoctrination and a belief in superiority. While that is a solid explanation on a societal level, I’m much more interested in how this plays out on the individual level. I feel drawn to redemption through sacrifice, but also to sacrifice as punishment for the violence that the West inflicts on other territories (and sometimes itself). I’ve written both, sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes full of doubt. It’s a difficult topic to tackle, with the risk of coming across as condescending or drowning in white guilt. But at the end of the day, all I’m trying to do is come to an understanding of Western attitudes towards indigenous people and cultures. And that, in turn, makes me wonder whatever happened to my own indigenous culture.

“Indigenous” probably isn’t the right term in this context. I was born and mostly raised in The Netherlands, so most people would say I am a product of Judeo-Christian culture. But long before the missionaries reached our swampy lands in the early Middle Ages, there were people here who held their own beliefs, who prayed to their own gods. People who didn’t let the Romans conquer them and took a hammer to missionaries’ skulls when they came to convert them. I can’t tell you a single thing about these people and their beliefs. We refer to their religions as “paganism”, automatically viewing them through a Christian lense. When Christianity eventually took hold, it destroyed everything that came before it. Much later, calvinism made sure to erase whatever folklore and superstitions had remained. I’ve always experienced this as a loss. I’ve never sat around a campfire with friends, sharing stories about the local forest or speculating about a haunted house. I’ve never seen traces of a religious past beyond what the church deemed acceptable. Only the purest form of Christianity was permitted in my hometown for a long time, leaving no space for ghosts, demons, or cryptids. I can trace my family tree back to the 1600s, but I have no idea what my ancestors believed in before they were forced into Christianity. I saw a person of Cherokee descent explain online that “when you’re hearing the stories, or in the barely touched lands your ancestors roamed, you can feel it in your soul”¹. I have never felt that. The stories are lost, the lands cultivated. The tie between me and my ancestors has been severed by the knife of religion, and so my characters are always in search of what links them with the past. My dream is to write a YA novel in which the characters find their way back to the pagan gods and all the supernatural beings that once roamed these lands. I yearn for the atmospheric, slightly threatening magic of the ancient forests that came long before the farm lands and churches of my lifetime. Beyond all, I crave connection with a long forgotten past.

Rushing from temp job to training to Ren fair these past two weeks, I had precious little time to put my thoughts into words. I struggled in part because I did not take myself seriously anymore. Why focus on fiction when there’s a job offer? Why accept the offer when you’ve lived this scenario before, with devastating result? Why keep returning to the same things over and over? I like to hide behind such questions, but found myself answering them anyway. Reflecting on my obsession themes has helped me overcome a feeling of inferiority related to my genre. There’s an assumption that there’s not much depth to horror. When I tell people I write horror, they assume I go for cheap thrills and bloody slashers. Those things have never scared me much. The scariest thing on this planet is the human mind and what it can warp into. Horror is a perfect genre to explore cultural and societal themes. It may not be your preferred genre, but I hope to see you there when I publish my first work. I’ll take myself seriously again this week. And if I don’t, I’ll find a way to work that into a short story too.

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1. User bear9703 commented these words on Wendigoon’s video on the Brown Mountain Lights and perfectly described the feeling that I year for, but will never be able to experience. Thank you.