The Year I Couldn’t Fly
On Kiki’s Delivery Service, burnout, and the kind of flying nobody applauds
At thirteen, Kiki packs one bag, takes one broom, and leaves home under the first clear full moon. That is the custom for young witches: you choose a town, you fly there alone, and you spend a year finding out what you are when nothing is holding you up.
I have loved Kiki’s Delivery Service for a long time. I only understood why when I was living its second half: far from home, in a small room, without a broom and without a cat who could talk, wondering when exactly I had lost something I used to do without thinking.
This is the story of the year I couldn’t fly. And of the girl in the film who couldn’t either.
The City I Built in My Head
Kiki arrives in Koriko with a seaside skyline already waiting in her imagination. The real city is beautiful, but it is also busy, loud, and not especially interested in her. People hurry past. A police officer scolds her for flying badly through traffic. Nobody is waiting with a welcome.
I knew that feeling. I had spent years building a city in my head, from what everyone said about it: creative, vibrant, full of people who stay up late for ideas rather than deadlines. What I found was a campus stretched thin, teaching that stopped at the syllabus, and an hour-long commute just to buy materials for a single project. The city I imagined and the city I lived in were not the same place.
Then there was the work itself. Flying is the one thing Kiki is sure of, so she builds a delivery service on it. It turns out that a talent is only one room, and running a life is the whole house: schedules, weather, money, rent. My years of drawing carried me through the first year of Interior Design. By the third semester I had met the rest of the house: construction, structure, materials, building systems, technical documentation. My head start covered one corner of a very large room.
Nobody exactly lied to either of us. The distance between the picture and the place is simply where the work begins, and where the first cracks show.
The Flight That Faded
What I love about this film is that it has no villain. Kiki does not lose her power in one catastrophe. It leaks away. She works long days. She delivers a pie in the rain, and the granddaughter who receives it shrugs and says she doesn’t even like it. Kiki is soaked, tired, and quietly hurt, and no one notices. She watches girls her age move through the city so easily, and she feels small beside them. Then one morning she tries to take off, and the broom barely lifts.
My version didn’t have a single bad day. It had a hundred small ones. I skipped meals, then simply forgot them. I stopped protecting my sleep. The things that used to restore me (painting, novels, exercise) went quiet one by one, and none of it was a decision. I just stopped being able to hold anything as important beyond whatever was due.
Burnout rarely arrives as a collapse. It arrives as a slow leak, and you only notice when you try to rise.
What frightened me was not the tiredness. It was reaching for something that had always been there, and finding it gone.
Jiji, and the Bridge That Collapsed
The most devastating moment in the film is easy to miss. Kiki wakes up, and Jiji, the cat who has talked with her every day of her life, is just a cat. He meows. She cannot understand him. She loses her flight and her closest conversation in the same stretch of days.
In my own version, what went quiet was not a cat. It was the bridge between my inside and my outside. My face stayed flat when something should have moved me. My laugh stopped sounding like mine. The feelings were there, somewhere underneath, but they couldn’t find a way out. For someone whose identity had always been built on expression, that was its own kind of grief, and almost invisible to the people who loved me from far away. I no longer knew how to begin telling them.
The film never turns this into a speech. Kiki doesn’t announce that she can’t hear Jiji anymore. She just stops being understood, and keeps going. So did I.
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Here is the part I find quietly hopeful. By the end, Kiki is flying again, but the film never makes a victory of Jiji’s voice. He has a life of his own now, and the two of them are fine. I used to think healing meant getting the old language back. I now think it can mean learning a new one, slowly, with people who are patient while you stammer. Mine started with one honest sentence to a friend: I’m not okay, but I’m working on it.
Ursula’s Cabin
The turning point of the film is not a training montage. Kiki leaves the city for a cabin in the woods, where a painter named Ursula lives. Ursula takes her in, gives her a corner of the room, and lets her be.
What stays with me is what Ursula shares. The way I remember it, she tells Kiki that she has been exactly here: a stretch when she could not paint, and the harder she pushed, the worse it got. The way through, she says, is not more effort. It is to stop, to wander, to look at the sky, to sleep, and to ask yourself why you do this at all. Flying, like painting, has to come from your own reason.
I heard that as a design student who had spent two years pushing harder every time something went wrong. Ursula’s cabin is the opposite of everything I was doing: rest without shame. For me it has looked like trying to paint again, just for myself, with no assignment attached. Finishing a novel. Moving my body. Sleeping with intention instead of exhaustion. Not all at once, and not every day.
And then the question I had been avoiding: what am I actually building, and is the foundation real?
The answer was not a number on a transcript. It was something truer. I want to design spaces that are inhabited, spaces that remember there are people inside them. A designer who has lived in a space that doesn’t support them designs differently. Ursula’s lesson is one every good designer eventually learns: your reason has to be load-bearing.
A Borrowed Broom
The last act of the film is not triumphant, and that is why it works. An airship breaks loose, and Tombo, the boy who has been quietly kind to Kiki since she arrived, is dangling from it. Her own broom is broken. She doesn’t wait until she is ready. She borrows a stiff street-cleaning brush from a stranger, wobbles into the air, nearly falls, and keeps trying until it finally catches.
She doesn’t fly because she has recovered. She flies because someone she cares about needs her, and because she has remembered why she flies at all. She does it on a borrowed broom, badly, before it feels safe.
That is how it is going for me, too. Nothing about this looks like a montage. My grades stayed messy for a while. My GPA is not the number I once pictured, and I did not finish in four years. But I kept saying yes to the things that reminded me who I was: a portfolio I could pour myself into, a community of curious and alive people, an overnight trip to an event I almost skipped. I am rising on whatever is nearest, whatever will hold.
Kiki stayed in her city, and I went home to mine. For a long time I thought that made my ending the wrong shape. I don’t anymore. Going home let me exhale, but it didn’t finish the work. I’m still in process. We were both doing the same thing: looking for the ground that would let us rise.
A Note for Whoever Is on the Ground
I’m writing this from inside it, not from the other side.
If you are in your own year of not flying, I won’t tell you it ends quickly. I will tell you what I wish someone had told me: losing your flight does not mean you have lost your gift. It may only mean you were carrying more than the gift was built to hold.
You are allowed to land. Find your own Ursula’s cabin: a person, a hobby, a room where nothing is asked of you. Ask yourself why you wanted to fly in the first place. The answer may be smaller or stranger than you expect, and it will hold more weight than ambition ever did.
And when you rise again, it may not look the way it used to. It may be wobbly. It may be on a borrowed broom.
Rise anyway.
