I don't know what I came here to write about, but it's been a while since the last time and I feel like expressing myself in writing. Not privately, but publicly. Which, every time I feel this urge, is a very strange sensation for me, because I have an innate need to be invisible. To be as anonymous as possible. And at the same time I feel the need to influence the world and leave it a little better than when I came into it. As you can imagine, this is a strange limbo to live in. So I wonder. How did I end up in this limbo in the first place? Is it because we women have been conditioned into being pretty but invisible? Into not rocking the boat? Shying away from the spotlight? I think for a big part we have. We have allowed ourselves to be put in glass boxes where we can be looked at, but not heard. Where we can be pretty without being a personality. All of this is nothing new. We have heard this same song for the last 7 decades, at least. But we're almost in 2018 and the song hasn't changed. The way women react to it hasn't changed much either. We still bitch and moan about not being equal. We still shout from the top of our lungs that we women should unite. And at the same time we keep raising our sons differently than our daughters. At the same time we keep accepting less pay. At the same time we keep gossiping about other women every chance we get. We keep overreacting about awful things women do and underreacting about the same awful things men do. We keep assuming that a surgeon is a man. We keep underestimating a female CEO. We keep calling our female friends 'my bitches'. We keep letting ourselves be interrupted by someone else, but expect a man to keep talking. We keep associating weakness with feminine traits. How are we owning up to the fact that we are to blame for the biggest part of this inequality? Are we even aware of being the biggest party to cultivate this unbalance? No. We are unaware because we are too occupied living out our drama. Singing our song. Which means we must be getting something out of it. There must be a benefit for us hidden in the drama of yelling 'we should be equal to men!'. On some level, we are choosing the false benefits of our drama over authentic equality. It is not easy to admit this about ourselves. We would rather blame someone else for our misery. But if we're truly honest, we know. We KNOW that we are the ones who have been maintaining this misery. I think this is good. This is a first step. A first step to come out of any misery, really. Acknowledge your own contribution to it. And then?
And then we let this awareness sink in and take some time recover from this blow to our persona. And then we go out in the world again. With this huge essential shadow part of ourselves, integrated into our collective psyche. And now we live our daily lives, aware of our shadow. Aware of our actions that foster inequality, helplessness and dependency. And we learn to live unapologetically authentic lives. Grounded in the awareness of our actions. Aware of how we speak, how we dress, how we listen, how we treat others, how we own our weaknesses, how we love, how we respect, how we live. This awareness will make us whole. This awareness will replace the false benefits we have been getting from the drama. Because being whole is being enough.
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SpiralsIn about 5 days I will complete my 40th spiral around the sun.
I have taken a whole year to get used to saying forty, by replying 'I'm almost 40' when someone asks me my age. Which at the same means forfeiting my last chances of saying thirtynine. And even that. Sacrificing my last thirtysomething year, did not help. Yesterday it hit me hard. The complete ridiculousness of having to say forty. Not believing your own age is weird. I know I don't look my age. And I know I don't feel my age. But with every cell of my body not believing my own age was a new level of weird. It's a twilight zone I didn't know existed inside myself. But enough about the shock. Let's do something else. This blog is called Spirals. Spirals are pretty. And they're the fabric that is our universe. Look at DNA. Now look at a galaxy. Now look at a wave. Now look at how the planets move around the sun. Now look at shells. Now try walking on a straight line when you're drunk. See? Spirals everywhere. Spirals are not the same as circles. They do move in circles, but go a level up. Or down. Depending on which way you're facing. More than 10 years ago I started kinda blogging on MySpace. Then, in 2007 I started writing a book. Then in October 2015 I wrote a guest blog for T'Aki Mi Ta Beba (TMTB). Many people liked it. Shared it. Posted it everywhere. Even today I was approached by a newspaper. They want to publish it. I asked them if they knew it was a blog from 2015. They don't care. Go ahead I said. They will they said. I continued blogging weekly with TMTB. Then I stopped blogging. 2 weeks ago. I needed a break. And some time to hide under my rock. I thought it would take at least a few months before I felt like blogging again. But my skin is turning yellow here, underneath my trusty old rock. My eyes watery. And my writing juices apparently are still flowing. Because here I am. Again. Writing. About nothing. Yet. Spirals are everywhere. |
Photos used under Creative Commons from julian_fern, Humphrey King