Star's Story: A Duck Was Born

--By Star Williams

With thanks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer for this awesome moment.

You can read the complete article at Thrive Global.

Duck physically arrived at the beginning of the lockdown, when COVID-19 was officially scary. He’s the kind of toy you buy a toddler—soft and fleecy, with a felt beak and flippers. He was finally here for us to see.

But in truth, he’d been with us for years.

My partner Jake and I both got through our childhoods by creating stories for ourselves. For my part, starting at the age of eight, I sat down every weekend and created a cat newspaper (or cat mewspaper) called The Cat Mews. It told news stories of local cats, shared the cat television schedule, and even provided a cat advice column. The pain and abuse of my day-to-day childhood, when I was gaslighted, bullied, and physically abused, could not touch that spotless world—the world that loved me back.

Anais Nin, one of my writing heroes, struggled to find a world in which she could live, as a woman and a partner, wrote, “I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”

And that is the reason for Duck.

Duck came arrived in our imaginations when we’d just moved to my country of origin, the United Kingdom. (I’d been living in the US for over a decade, by then.) It was an overseas move that was extremely stressful. Once we’d finally arrived, after some intense visa complications, we realized that the UK’s laws actually blocked our medical needs. We literally couldn’t get hold of the prescriptions that we actively needed. [Read the rest of the article at Thrive Global.]