Don't Lean on Me, Fool

We lean on something when we know we need some sort of assistance.

Like when I was climbing Machu Picchu with the sweat pouring down my body and the height suffocating my lungs and the pain searing my legs. When I felt so hopeless and lacking upkeep from myself that I turned to falling in a hopeless pile of burning muscles and annoyed thoughts onto a rock.

To gain support.

And in the same way that when I feel like a batch of pent-up emotions and a quivering mess because the day has all but shot me down, I turn to my mom just because her advice and her presence makes me feel balanced.

We lean on certain things when we know we can’t manage on our own.

And, I mean, it’s fine every once in a while, when times get tough, to admit defeat and admit we need help. But needing support every single day? Living life depending on someone to get us by?

“The Pontelliers and the Ratignolles walked ahead; the women leaning upon the arms of their husbands.”

These women wander through life perpetually leaning on their husbands, as if rendering themselves dependent on them to walk on their two God-given legs.

These women meander through life accepting the fact that they need a man in order to get by.

Kate Chopin isn’t just physically stating the slight weight the women displace on their husbands while walking a mere two feet. She is describing a society where women are not viewed as equal—even to themselves—and hang on to a good life by being permanently attached to a man.

Quite frankly, it’s sad.

It is after this that she tumbles into the ocean like child, a ‘feeling of exultation’ overtaking her “as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength….As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.”

It is after, for some random instant, she decided to throw herself into the water, careless and oblivious and free, that she manages to awaken to control over herself, while she’s in the water. She reached out for something, for a dream, for a hope, in which to lose herself and find herself.

And it is after she has been in the ocean that “She took his arm, but she did not lean upon it. She let her hand lie listlessly.”

It is after she has meandered into the ocean, the sea of awakening that helps her delve into herself and reach control, that she walks back out and doesn’t seem to lean on Mr. Pontellier, doesn’t recognize the need to find support in his presence, the need to depend on him in order to get on through life.

It is with the sea that she acknowledges, unconsciously, the fact that she does not need to depend on a man.

Which makes me think of a sea that would make government workers acknowledge the lack of need for war and careless civilians the necessity of recycling all the while rendering rapists and serial killers enlightened as to the dreadfulness and pointlessness of their current actions.

But that will be the day.