I spent a good hour in the coffee shop this morning sorting her out, and though I don't think she's good and properly done yet (heaven forbid) I do think she is getting there.
Motivation is the problem. I'd made her insular yet curious and the two qualities contrast too much. I need more reasons to take on the boar and the bear at face value, and I need another reason for having her work at what is, essentially, a dead end, low paid and boring job, when I fact she is this interesting and courageous person.
Basically, I concluded that instead of lonely she is bored, but that she puts up with being bored because it is better than what she was before, which was in trouble.
Of course I know people like this. They had too much too young and now they just want things to be easy, although they are capable of so much more. However, no matter how much they batten down the hatches they have an inextinguishable zest for life that will always carry them to the next chapter.
By trouble, I don't mean with the law, Leanne is too well meaning for that. Trouble most likely with letting her zest for life get out of hand. She has, for me the outlook on life and the actions of someone who sometime in their life has been an addict. Whether it be to drugs or some social situation; the external thing began to rule her life so much that she began to live for it and let it control her, rather than use it as some way of supplementing her enjoyment life. A time when she lived too much in the now, with not enough eye on the future - something many people (but not all) do when they are living independently for the first time.
She rectified the situation in time, but she retains I think that air of brittleness on the surface of her personality that people who wear the scars of a great addiction do: a certain unwillingness to engage with what they love most because they know it will burn them.
This means that to become involved with the bear and the boar she also has to be very courageous, very brave, and very convinced that it is something that only she can do.
I think she has to be looking for a crusade, or a quest, something to prove herself worthy of living, but because she is open minded, the boar and bear present something more interesting than say, joining the armed services or the police force would allow. Of course her addictive background may dissuade her from wanting to join an official organisation.
For a moment I had her getting mixed up with a cult, because I think that could happen as a consequence of her curiosity and the feeling that she doesn't quite fit. Instead, I think she would have been the type to join up with the God-squad at college or university, then be persuaded to leave, or maybe just feel it wasn't for her, because her other life, the one spent experimenting with drugs and social situations.
She has a zest for life, that is sure. Every breath she or anyone else takes on this planet is not a miracle because she knows of the practical, scientific reasons for it, but she feels intuitively that every breath is survival. She is tuned in to the improbability of living. That is the bestial side of her. Apart from that she is nothing unusual. I want her to be quite normal. I had written:
I think she may have joined the god-squad, at college for instance, then her impulse for alcohol fuelled diversions may have caused them to disown her. This saved her sanity: "Not even they will have me and they pick up all the waifs and strays, and oddballs and even odder, completely round the twist balls who are a danger to themselves, and the self-regarding and the self-righteous who are not mad by popular distinction yet who are all the madder for it." Her natural optimism, self-confidence will save her at this point when she realises she's saner, more normal and more socially acceptable than she thought, despite her unconventionality. She hasn't found where she fits yet, but that is no reason to expect never to do so, or let the fact of it depress her.
I've also written that there is a corollary of this rejection; a symptom of her bestial side that is utterly practical, which is to do with the acknowledgement of survival and the celebration of life - that is nothing to do with anyone else's philosophy of the meaning of life, but is wholly intuitive.
The animal side of her is simply present in her acknowledgement of death and renewal. That death is the natural order of things. Somehow the bear and the boar have become unstuck from this order, and she too is stuck. The aim of all their struggles is to unstick themselves.
This intuitive side can also help explain that she is able to follow her instincts. When summing up a situation she isn't blinded by the assumption that it because she has neither seen nor heard of something that doesn't mean it cannot be. She is astoundingly open. That of course makes her also gullible, and for me that's a good combination: curiosity and openness. Good qualities with an explorable flaw.
She's slowly coming together.
So if anyone actually is reading the boar story, please bear in mind (intended pun) that it's a first draft and though I'm posting it online and I really shouldn't until it's finished but the thought that someone might be reading it is driving me on (I'm terrible at completing things - I have an office full of half-started projects) because I'd be embarrassed if I didn't bring it to some kind of satisfactory conclusion. It will change in the end, and probably not hang together completely until then despite my best efforts. Eventually the daft draft will be done and I can begin glorious revision, and once that is done to my nit-picking best I will post the finished thing up too. There, I've promised, and now I have to.
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