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Brittney Griner, the U.S. basketball star, was recently interviewed in the New York Times, a precursor to her new memoir about her time in a Russian prison. In the interview, she talked candidly about what happened, how the ghosts of her childhood related to not fitting in physically re-emerged, triggered by those who had power over her. In prison, Griner was placed in a cage half the size of her body when she was transported. She was given prison uniforms that didn’t fit. And in media appearances, she was paraded “like a dog on a leash” for the press. On one occasion, she was told to strip and guards photographed her body. It was humiliating, she told the interviewer. Griner wrote in the margins of a Bible, the only material she was allowed, to make meaning of her experience. And when she returned, she thought throwing herself back into her sport would save her. But it didn’t, not entirely. The childhood ghosts followed her, carrying with them vestiges of low self-esteem despite her own power on the court and in the press. “That is her soul work,” I thought at the time. And that work is before us all today. To tell the stories that hold power over us dismantles them, at least in part. Do we ever really clear out the ghosts and the stories we tell ourselves about them? I ask that now as I face, again in my seventies, the ghosts that haunted me at 40 and 50 and 60 thanks to yet another transition. Now? Again? Does it ever end, this merry-go-round of self-reclamation? No, my new therapist reminds me, a therapist whose waiting list I was on for six months and who magically appeared at the start of 2024, sans co-pay, a cosmic nod of approval. You go deeper into the core of who you are and emerge, weeks-month-years later, with more of your self intact. For me, this time, the demand is to reclaim my voice and the power of my words. Indeed, as an astrologer in a long-ago reading once told me, the work, for all of us these days, is to “un-sublimate the feminine,” however that creative energy emerges. And so I light the candle and perform my own form of alchemy. I write. Carolyn
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