Ask the Trope Fairy: Can You Be Magical And Also Safe?
Ask the Trope Fairy is an advice column for characters navigating science fiction and fantasy realms. In this dimension, advice is published on alternate Fridays.
Dear Trope Fairy,
My life is very different than what it was last year. Mostly for the good!
My family has moved to Spain without me, to escape the law, and I get to live with my former teacher, who actually loves me and helps me learn and study and get all the books I could want. My parents thought my books were a waste of time and that I myself was a waste of space. But I actually got to rescue my new guardian from her evil aunt and school principal!
I could save my teacher and now-guardian because I developed telekinetic powers that allowed me to pretend to be her father’s ghost and use psychological triggers to make her think that she was being haunted by the man she defrauded and (may have) murdered. She’s disappeared and everything is better at school and at my new home.
Except that I don’t have my powers anymore. My new guardian says that she thinks the magic was a buildup of my unused energy from not being challenged in class. Now that I am taking high school classes (as a first grader, technically), I think she might be right, but to me, the emotional trauma seems a more likely source. I’ve looked into the literature, and while there is nothing on manifesting supernatural abilities, the pattern otherwise tracks.
But now that my life is better, it’s also less magical.
I would have made that trade in a heartbeat this time last year. But I do miss being able to move a pencil with my mind. And is that really the tradeoff of magic? You have to be miserable and unchallenged to be truly special?
Plus, my reading suggests that the early childhood I experienced is classic emotional abuse and should have left lingering trauma, so shouldn’t some powers linger as I work to resolve it?
I have gone over and over the logic that I am happy now, that I wouldn’t trade living with my new guardian for anything…but I still feel like something was taken from me. Something I would have willingly sacrificed but never actually agreed to. Something that made me the person all these better things happened to. So what is to keep them from going away again?
It’s not logical. My current guardian loves me and won’t reject me. But what if I need my powers again and I can’t be miserable enough fast enough? What if I never feel as good as I did when I was saving the day with telekinesis?
Dear Safe,
It is one thing to know that you are safe. It is quite another to believe it deep down.
You cannot logic your way out of emotions. I know it seems like you should be able to, with an intellect as powerful as yours, but the premise of therapy is not that simply understanding the source of your feelings will make them go away or even become less intense.
You are safe(r) than you were. I am beyond glad. I am tempted to question some of the blurring of authority figure lines that may have been crossed in the process, but it seems to have resulted in a stable, loving situation for you, so I won’t quibble. That is wonderful!
But it doesn’t erase the trauma of being abused by your family of birth. You were mistreated for so long. You will have been abused and unloved for most of your life, for many years yet. Unlearning the alienation and fear of losing any solace you carve out for yourself will take at least that long. I am sorry, but this work is not any faster for the intellectually gifted. You cannot skip a grade in emotional healing.
Those are my answers to the questions you did not ask. You actually asked me how to reconcile yourself to the loss of your magical powers, especially if it is connected to your happiness or deep-seated, lonely boredom. I am glad you know that your healthy home life will better set you up for success and happy adulthood than magical powers, but I understand why you don’t feel like that is true.
You used to be able to move things with your mind! You defeated a bully (and ?murderess?) with them, you saved a person you have come to love from the clutches of evil! You did great and wonderful things to earn your happiness — a happiness that you never should have had to earn.
I understand missing that.
Especially when you still feel the lingering effects of what was once so painful. Shouldn’t the unusual fringe benefit of your trauma linger at least as long? Sadly, the world doesn’t work that way. Manifesting magical power in your dimension takes an extreme situation (for humans), and I don’t want you back in any kind of situation like that if it can be helped.
But if you want your powers back, well, I have both good news and bad news. They are the same statement, actually: the world is full of horrors.
You may well find yourself in the situation you anticipate, when you need your powers again. Or you may use the profound empathy that led you to fight to save your teacher/adopted mother and apply it more broadly. I don’t know if you have recognized this thread in your own story yet, but I notice your telekinesis tends to have been used primarily to save your teacher/guardian. Your greatest feats do not sound like they were in your own defense. Perhaps you can regain your powers even now, within a stable and happy family unit, by seeking out other wrongs to right on behalf of new friends and allies.
You do not have to go this route. You have done enough for one your age. You have done enough for a lifetime, perhaps. You deserve to rest.
But if you do not want that rest, well, there are a lot of horrors in the world that a bit of telekinesis wielded by a young genius might be able to solve or at least alleviate. The theory is worth testing in any case: can you summon your powers to protect someone else, even if you yourself are fulfilled intellectually and emotionally?
Do start small, but it is worth the attempt. Perhaps you can have both your magic and the stability you deserve. And if not, perhaps it will help the restless, something-missing feeling to find other ways to help those around you.
If so, I wish you luck in your continuing adventurers and may well have a list of names for you, collected from letters to this very columnn, that would benefit from the visit of a pint-sized avenging angel.
But either way, do not use your powers (or a book on psychoanalysis) as a substitute for some good therapy to address the old wounds.
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Transcribed and annotated by Katy Mulvaney with permission from the League of Fairy Surrogates and the Interdimensional Meta — Fantasy Council. The Trope Fairy can be reached by offering your letter to any turtle living in the wild. If you do not have the leisure or patience to wait for them to accept your offering, you may attempt to catch a hare in the wild, but I should warn you that this delivery method will take more time than the certified turtle mailcarriers.
