I Like Giants
First posted August 2020.
CWs: depression, death, suicide.
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The first time I remember the too-big feeling is when I was 15. I don’t want to say ‘feeling too big,’ because I think that has a connotation that doesn’t quite fit here; this isn’t a post about being or feeling fat. The too-big feeling was a product of depression that told me I needed to take up less space. I felt separated from my body, and that the being that was ‘me’ was shrinking, and that shrinking was good, and my body needed to follow suit. I would curl up in chairs as compactly as I could in an attempt to make myself smaller. I wanted to shrink away into nothing at all, and I was disappointed that my body refused to budge.
I didn’t discover Kimya Dawson’s Remember That I Love You until university, when I remember still curling up in the chair in my dorm room trying to make myself as small as I felt. I worked in the campus alumni house, and once or twice a week someone would send one of the student interns to walk some paperwork across campus to the main office building. It was a nice breath of fresh air in the middle of the day, about a 20-25 minute round trip, and I always took my mp3 player to listen to music on the way. One day, it was especially sunny, warm but not too hot with an early spring breeze, and I sat in a chair in the back of the alumni house with my legs tucked beneath me while I re-ordered a spreadsheet. It had been a rough week, and I was trying to distract myself with work. The weekly paperwork run fell to me, and I was almost reluctant to go, knowing that with no spreadsheet to focus on, I’d be left with music and my thoughts—a bad combination.
I walk fast. I regularly finished the paperwork run 10 minutes faster than the other interns. That day took longer than usual for me, because halfway across the green space between two dorm buildings, while listening to “I Like Giants,” I broke down crying. It was the line, “All girls feel too big sometimes, regardless of their size,” that got me. That song did not cure my depression, but it made me feel less alone, which helps pretty much anything.
We aren’t the giants in fairytales. We’re meant to be Jack the Giant-Killer, Molly Whuppie, or Maol a Chliobain. The heroes of these stories are strong, quick, clever, and brave, opposed to the slow, dim, and easily out-witted giants. But most of all, these heroes are small. We tell these stories to children to encourage them to think of themselves as heroes, as capable and independent individuals with the ability to save themselves and their families, no matter their size.
We aren’t the giants, but we also don’t have giants. In everyday life, one is rarely called upon to fling stones into the eyes of gargantuan humanoids threatening to grind one’s bones into bread flour. What giants in fairytales signify to us are our own metaphorical monsters. It’s nice to remember that sometimes the monster you’re fighting, though it may seem too enormous to fall, can be beaten. But what happens when your monster is inside your own mind?
Depression isn’t a giant that can be defeated. I am better than I was, but I’m not better and I’m not going to be. It’s not really a case of good times and bad times with depression, but of okay times and manageable times. I haven’t had the too-big feeling in years—which is not to say I’m not depressed anymore, it just manifests in new terrifying ways instead of the old terrifying ones. But in all these years living with this giant, I’ve learned to be okay with myself and to be okay with my depression. I don’t remember where I saw it, but I saw someone say once that depression as a teenager feels like this crushing, horrifying, villainous monster that you lack the strength to fight, and depression as an adult feels like an annoying roommate who doesn’t spend a whole lot of time at home, but when they do, they’re a jerk, and you just sigh and go, “Great, it’s this foolishness again.”
The giantess in these giant stories is often kind to the hero. She tells Molly Whuppie and her sisters that she will protect them from her husband, the giant. And she does try, but her efforts are thwarted through no fault of her own. In some versions, the hero tricks the giant into killing his wife. In others, the giantess’s fate is unknown. Female giants in folklore and mythology have more varied stories and purposes, but that’s a topic for another day. In specifically the Jack and the Beanstalk and Molly Whuppie type stories, the giantess is a kind-hearted woman doing her best.
“The giant on the cliff wished that she was dead
And the lemmings on the cliff wished that they were dead
So the giant told the lemmings why they ought to live instead
And when she thought up all those reasons that they ought to live instead
It made her reconsider all the sad thoughts in her head.”
- Kimya Dawson, “I Like Giants”
Depression is a mental illness, and it is not an entity that wishes me good or harm. But I think, in the context of the song, it helps to think of depression more as the giantess than the giant. Depression doesn’t intend to hurt me, even though it does. It’s just chemicals gone wrong. And in that sense, I can at least be gentle with it. I’m small, but I don’t want to self-destruct myself into something smaller anymore. I don’t like depression, but I understand it more now. I’m not Molly Whuppie and I’m not going to kill the giant. But we might bake a cake and watch some TV. And we’ll be okay.
If you ever hear someone
Say you are huge look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun
Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky
And say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
And I don't wanna make her cry
‘Cause I like giants.
- Kimya Dawson, “I Like Giants”