Wilderness by Steve McCarthy
An emotional and heartwarming post from author Steve McCarthy! It will really make you think!
The shapes people make are everything to me: our posture, how we carry ourselves, where we put ourselves in a room. I think it really tells you a lot about what a person is feeling.
When I set out to write a children’s book, the initial idea was to try and write a story about the least interesting character. I wanted to take the kid in the corner, doing everything to make themselves the smallest shape possible, and throw them into a real adventure.
I love adventure stories, but my favourites all seemed to feature a main character who was reluctant to be the main character, because that’s what it feels like right?
Everyone’s doing a dance-off at the party, and you’re just hoping that by some stroke of luck, you have recently gained the ability to become invisible. Everyone is jumping into the water, you are three kids away from your turn, it’s a big drop, you can’t back out now, the girl in front of you is planning a backflip, and you’re hoping this is when the Earth’s governments finally make contact with aliens, so everyone will forget about backflips and dance-offs.
I was a terrified kid, scared of everything, and I seemed to be perpetually surrounded by braver, more interesting, backflipping heroes with incredible rhythm. The shame of overthinking every possible humiliation was all consuming, and I often wished I could just shed this horrible feeling, but in the end I realised the fear wasn’t going away, but the call to adventure had become louder. I was still scared, the feeling remained, but I had adventures anyway, and after a time I grew to understand. That feeling, the panic, the hollowing of my insides and my heart ringing in my ears, that is just what bravery felt like.
I would later arrive at the theory that it was this very hyper-vigilance that gave me the useful ability to see details others had missed, indeed sometimes I missed what was directly in front of me, simply because I’d seen something off in the distance that was objectively missable in every way.
It also gave me a soft spot for humans who believed themselves to be objectively missable in every way.
At some point I realised that whatever I’d been through, my younger brother was experiencing tenfold. I watched as he, braver than anyone (because those with the most fear are the bravest) made his way through the world, wide-eyed and absolutely prepared to be attacked by wild hyenas, roaming a cul-de-sac in south County Dublin. He was, is, and always will be a main character, it’s just who he is, whether he likes it or not, and yet every fibre of his being rejected that starring role.
I made it my mission to give him all the cheat codes in life, and because he’s a clever bastard he quickly realised I was the cheat code, and every calamity I faced saved him the trouble, and emboldened him to be braver.
As adults we have had plenty of conversations about our childhood neuroses and the strange ways these led to riskier and riskier behaviour. In the same way you instinctively press a bruise on your arm, just to see if it still hurts, or tongue a cut on your lip to feel it sting, me and my brother were constantly testing our very real anxiety just to see if it was still there, and it always was.
I still carry anxiety everywhere, but I’m really large now, I am a man of substantial shape. I regularly fail at dance-offs gladly, and jump off all manner of things, but I can see children like me everywhere. I didn’t grow into anxiety, I grew to understand it better, it was always with me, but as a child I didn’t know what it was, and it made me feel like making myself the smallest shape possible, to stay in the corner, unnoticed. I didn’t want to write a handbook with cheat codes, I just wanted to write an adventure story, with my favourite kind of main character, one that is, and always will be, a main character, whether they like it or not.
Wilderness by Steve McCarthy is published by Walker Books and available now.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation