Once there was a girl much like any other....

June 22, 2017 11:24 AM

The Heart and the Bottle. A Tender Illustrated Fable of What Happens When We Deny Our Difficult Emotions.
posted by storybored (15 comments total)

This is super sweet. I really appreciate that it shows that you can't just decide to start feeling again once you've closed yourself up, that it takes time and work and other perspectives to do it.

I don't have kids and I don't envy kids who have this world to grow up in, but I am constantly surprised and touched by how much I see parents today encouraging kids to feel what they feel. That was just not on the radar when I was coming up, not even for well-meaning parents.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:35 AM on June 22, 2017 [13 favorites]

"Feeling unsure, the girl thought the best thing was to put her heart in a safe place.

Just for the time being.

So she put it in a bottle and hung it around her neck.

And that seemed to fix things … at first."

posted by [insert clever name here] at 11:43 AM on June 22, 2017 [4 favorites]

....aaaand purchased.

Oliver Jeffers is a treasure and a favorite bedtime author for my kids. Sad stories are sometimes the best ones because they make your kids hug you the hardest. I say this as someone who gets choked up at the end of Knuffle Bunny Free every damn time.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 12:34 PM on June 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

Both tha Amazon link and the app store (had to switch to UK store) show page not found. Is there anywhere else to access them?
posted by bendy at 12:53 PM on June 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

oliver jeffers is the shit, in heartfelt and beautifully illustrated children book terms.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:24 PM on June 22, 2017

But isn't the bottling of difficult emotions the very definition of emotional labor?
posted by SPrintF at 3:54 PM on June 22, 2017

If you google 'the heart and the bottle app' it gives a good link.
posted by eggkeeper at 3:58 PM on June 22, 2017

This is coming out somewhere between 20 and 2 years after I needed it.
posted by PMdixon at 4:12 PM on June 22, 2017 [3 favorites]

good thing there are books now to explain to children that the untutored emotions and instincts they have when their parents die are mistaken, misguided, and ultimately harmful. I have always wondered how much better off I might have been if, after my father died, a helpful picture book had been given to me to teach me that I wasn't experiencing or expressing the appropriate amount of emotional pain and that in thirty years I'd be sorry for not cross-checking my reactions against the adult-approved feelings list.

but the pictures are nice! and it may be better than it's represented. because a book whose message is "terrible things that happen to you through no fault of your own have terrible consequences for you later in life" is fine and good. whereas I cannot say the same for an essay whose message is that children shouldn't try to emotionally protect themselves, because adults know better and say not to, and you should do as you're told or else the beauty of the stars and the sea and the sky will be lost to you.
posted by queenofbithynia at 4:25 PM on June 22, 2017 [4 favorites]

As a child of militant Catholics who taught me to suppress emotion, judge those who are different, and use passive aggressiveness to get your emotional needs met, who's been through literally decades of therapy to try and be happy, my big experiment in rearing my own children is to expose them to a wide variety of subject matter and emotional responses and to normalize everything before they experience it, in the hope that when they *do* confront difficult things, they have the ability to be honest and deal with it on their own terms, and hopefully accept that Dad always thinks their feelings are ok when he tries to help them move forward.

This is a story about one little girl who grew up her own way and there was pain and ultimately resolution. It either speaks to you or it doesn't.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 6:27 PM on June 22, 2017 [10 favorites]

Thanks eggkeeper!
posted by bendy at 6:34 PM on June 22, 2017

This reminds me a little of Shaun Tan's work.
posted by colorblock sock at 8:33 PM on June 22, 2017

Pretty dark, and the evils of bottling up are a dubious cliche.

I've been told that rule number one about grief is; you don't know how other people need to deal with it.
posted by Segundus at 11:33 PM on June 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

Beautiful, and new to me. I don't think I'm ready to read this to my kids, as I'm afraid they would act as I would--as I did for other reasons--at their age, and begin to fear that dad is very much mortal and temporary. And now I'm adrift, as I sit here in a library in a little northern California town, in memory and deep feelings of transience and beauty and loss, and little cool ripples of hope for I'm not sure, maybe more understanding.
posted by nicholai88 at 11:56 AM on June 23, 2017

In the aftermath of my mother's death, I wish somebody — anybody — had said anything along the lines of "you're having to clamp down and bottle things up now because you've got to deal with the practicalities, but you should recognize that's what you're doing and when the time is right start dealing with it." Maybe I would've gotten into therapy sooner. Maybe I would've found Zen earlier. Maybe I just wouldn't have wasted a year coming home every night after work to spend the evening with Ernest and Julio Gallo Hearty Red.

Different people react differently. Nothing I saw in the article or the images from the book indicated "THIS IS THE ONLY AND RIGHT WAY TO REACT AND IF YOU DO IT DIFFERENTLY YOU ARE WRONG AND BAD". If it doesn't speak to you, it doesn't speak to you. Fine. But given that it's a story about one girl's experience, not a normative "do it THIS way not THAT way" screed, if you're in the "doing it THAT way" camp maybe consider that it's speaking to the "THIS way" folks and just move on.
posted by Lexica at 5:25 PM on June 23, 2017