I'm revisiting #TheEyeoftheWorld for the first time since I first read it in middle school. I'm going on this very personal little journey with myself, and I thought it'd be nice to try to journal the experience here.

For background, I grew up in a very small, very poor little area of the desert. I first encountered the Wheel of Time because a friend was reading it and I liked the cover. My friend had gotten the book out of the school library; the selection there was small, and the books were old, many practically falling apart. This one wasn't quite, but it was well on its way. It was exactly the sort of thick, old paperback I'd heard older kids talk about when they talked about discovering The Lord of the Rings for the first time. And that's what The Eye of the World was to me; it was the massive High Fantasy epic saga in which I took refuge through the most perilous, the most tumultuous times of my young life.

I'm a #trans woman, but I didn't know that at the time, and I was under too many external stressors to have room to figure it out. In fact, for much of the time I was reading these books, I was deeply dissociative, which I attributed just to depression for a long time. Even through all that, though, I remember resonating with Robert Jordan's work and world mainly through his depictions of women.

For as much of the books make about "men's spheres" and "women's spheres," this very 1800's balance and delineation of work and social roles by sex and gender, I think Robert Jordan was actually making a case for exactly the opposite. Through his characters' personal journeys, he invites readers to question power and tradition, and to dismantle systems which are dysfunctional. In depicting the fantasy world that deconstructs the tropes and myths that make it up, Robert Jordan was also telling us that we should rigorously examine the structures of power that oppress us in our real world. We should look at the legends we're told, see them for what they are, come to understand them, and then we'd have the tools to take them apart.

At least, that's the message I got out of the books. Part of it, how I remember it, anyway. I hope it holds up.

For now, I'm just having a good time revisiting my good good idiot boys in their little village before everything goes to hell for them.

#TootsOfTime #WheelOfTime #WoTposting #genderidentity #feminism #literature #tootalong