What Björk Taught Me About the Child I Wasn’t Allowed to Be
For the boys I knew who were kindred spirits
When Björk said, in a 1995 interview, that at the age of five she made a “conscious decision” to stand on “the other side of the canyon,” something in me jolted awake. She meant the side where imagination is allowed to run feral, where play is intelligence, where mischief is a form of truth. A place where a child isn’t asked to shrink themselves to fit the furniture of adult expectations.
What struck me wasn’t just her certainty — it was that she had the permission to make that choice.
I didn’t.
I look at photographs of myself around that same age: six, maybe seven. First day of school, hair untamed, shirt askew, a grin that is half-rascal, half-escape artist. Or the local newspaper photo — me perched on a gate, eyes bright with something half-wild. Or the home cine-film: I’m naked, gleeful, running through a garden sprinkler like a creature caught between sunlight and instinct.
That boy knew exactly which side of the canyon he belonged on.
He just wasn’t allowed to live there.
The grown-ups in my world valued order, restraint, masculine seriousness, the neatness of conformity. My wildness was humour at best, inconvenience at worst. I learned early that being the clown was acceptable only in carefully controlled doses, and being a free spirit was something to be corrected, not cultivated.
And yet — boys like us saw each other.
We recognised in one another a secret pulse of mischief, imagination, and sideways thinking. Not rebellion for its own sake, but the quiet knowledge that there was more available to us than the narrow strip assigned by adults. We were natural canyon-crossers, thwarted by the fact that our environment kept the bridges guarded.
Björk had adults who said, “Yes — that’s your place. Go.”
We had adults who said, “Not that way.”
And so we tucked our wildness away.
We hid the parts that were too bright, too strange, too alive.
We became adept at camouflage: clever boys, well behaved boys, serious boys.
We learned to protect the canyon-child by splitting him off from daily life.
Some never found him again.
But here is the thing: the canyon never leaves you.
Even decades later, a scent, a piece of music, a memory of running through water, a dream you weren’t expecting — they all reopen the old terrain. They remind you of who you were before the injunctions began. They remind you that your instincts were not wrong; they were simply unsupported.
Listening to Björk as an adult, I realised the truth:
I didn’t fail to choose the other side of the canyon.
I simply had to postpone the crossing.
Every creative act I’ve undertaken since — the writing, the trees, the stories, the art, the coaching with mischief tucked into its seams — has been a slow, determined migration back to that side I was denied.
And what I wish, for the boys I knew, is this:
That you recognise the canyon in yourselves.
That you forgive the child who had no choice but to stay safe.
That you honour the instincts you hid away — the playful ones, the intuitive ones, the strange ones.
That you understand your creativity didn’t arrive late.
It was merely waiting for permission.
If Björk had the freedom to choose her side at five, we have the freedom to choose it now.
The canyon is still there.
So are we.
And it is never too late to cross.
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