Gwynn Raimondi, MA, LMFTA

Power of community

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The last few weeks have been interesting. An admitted sexual predator took the White House. We have seen blatant attempts at gaslighting by the White House press secretary. Hundreds of thousands of women ACROSS THE GLOBE on ALL seven continents marched for women’s rights. And then all the executive orders that have been flying at us, including a ban on refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries.  And during all of this I have been checking in with various feminist spaces, connecting and witnessing and observing.

I have witnessed both curious and beautiful discussion and learning as well as shaming and silencing.

I have watched people give advice or their opinions when it wasn’t asked for.

I have watched boundaries being crossed and consent being disregarded.

I have watched people clam up and/or get defensive and go on attack.

I have watched as some express their valid pain and rage and frustration.

And some of this has been online and some of it in person and some of it between adults and some of it with my children as they work out their own relationship of mutual respect and consent.

And where I’m landing in this moment, is we all have a lot of work to do.

And yes I mean the macro work of calling representatives and getting our hands and minds and bodies busy volunteering and doing the work of resisting and disrupting this new administration at every turn.

And I also mean we all, and I do mean WE ALL and I am most definitely including myself in this, have a lot of inner work still to do too.

We need to look at our own internalized misogyny.

We need to look at all our implicit biases.

We need to examine the ways each of us have silenced or shamed or gaslighted another, whether it was intentional or conscious or not.

We need to build our resilience.

We need to have a deep and clear and embodied understanding of consent and boundaries.

And we need to learn to sit in discomfort and know we’ll all live if we make a mistake or turn out to be in the wrong in some way.

We each have a lot of unlearning and relearning to do.

There are many, many ways to do this learning.

And I find one of the best ways to do this learning and unlearning is in community. With others who are also stumbling and finding their way in the unraveling and exploring and dismantling and dislodging.

In community where we can be witnessed and supported.

In community where we can be lovingly pushed outside our own comfort zones.

In community where we can make mistakes without risk of being shamed or ridiculed.

In community where we can connect with each other and see we are very much not alone.

I believe in the power of the community.  It is why most of my work is in the form of circles and groups.  There is magic that happens when people come together to dig deep, to find support, to be witness to others.  Something greater than the sum of each of the individuals  is born.  And it is amazing to be a part of and witness to.

I invite you to find your brave communities.  The ones where you will be both held and lovingly pushed.  The ones where you can sit in discomfort.  The ones where you can bear witness to the pain and struggles of others.  The ones where “negative emotions” aren’t dismissed or banned.  The ones where you can both be you just as you are and also learn to do and be different.

We all need these communities.  And sometimes our communities will stumble.  These are growing pains and we all come out of isolation and learn to be together again.  These are the growing pains of taking off our patriarchal leashes.  These are the growing pains of revolution and burning it down and building something new and different and better.

xoox

If you would like to join me in community, I have four circles that will be starting in March::

On March 1 Isabel Faith Abbott and I and others will gather together in circle to explore specifically the ideas of consent and boundaries. We will look at trauma and resilience. We will unravel stories and dislodge some of our conditioning of how we are “allowed” to be from our bodies and being. We will heal some of our wounds. And while I can’t tell you how this work will change you or how you will be different at the end of our six months together, I can tell you that shifting and unlearning and dismantling will happen – perhaps in big ways and perhaps in small.  You can learn more and register right here: http://gwynnraimondi.com/bodyofconsent

Also on March 1 a group of us will gather to explore our relationships with other women (including our mothers and grandmothers) and how our patriarchal wounding and conditioning has informed and affected these relationships.  We will be together for nine months, going deep, looking at intergenerational trauma, healing wounds, and connecting to our strengths.  You can learn more and request an application at http://gwynnraimondi.com/unleashingourself

On March 3 my six week in-person women’s circle workshop on self care will begin.  We’ll be learning and practicing how to soothe our nervous systems, embody our boundaries, and process and sit in uncomfortable emotions and sensations. It will be on Friday evenings from 7-9pm at Cunning Crow Apothecary in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle.  If you’d like to learn more and register go to: http://gwynnraimondi.com/rebellionselfcare

And on March  15th we will gather for my six month on-line women’s circle on self care for resistors, disruptors and fire breathers.  We will also be learning and practicing how to soothe our nervous systems, embody our boundaries, and process and sit in uncomfortable emotions and sensations. To learn more and register go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/selfcarerevolution

And of course if you would like to receive my weekly love letter, you can sign up for it right here http://gwynnraimondi.com/newsletter

 

Consent, complicity & rebellion (the complexity of consent part 3)

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The topic of consent has shown up over and over for me recently: in Isabel Abbott and Bronwyn Petry’s  course The Body Contains Multitudes; observing All Souls Day; in my work with my own therapist; in my ancestral work unraveling what the women and men who lived before me passed down to me and what is me and mine; in my constant work of dislodging and dismantling my own patriarchal training and doing all I can to not pass this training on to my own daughter (and failing, and doing better than my own mother did… sometimes progress is terribly incremental).

Consent.  The complexity of it.  How there is so much in our lives that we don’t consent to.  How so much lives in our own bodies that we never consented to–not only what we didn’t consent to in regard to our own lived experience, but also what our ancestors passed down to us, what lives in our cellular memory and our very DNA.

And while there is so much that lives within our bodies that we did not consent to, it is still ours to manage or heal or dislodge or unravel.  We have a responsibility to it, to ourselves, to understand all these parts and where they live and what messages they may have for us that are helpful and what messages they give us that are harmful.

We have a responsibility to untangle the web of stories and training and wounding and strengths that we did not ask for and are within us all the same.

Our bodies store it all. The pain and pleasures of our own lived experiences.  The memories that our mind doesn’t want us to remember.  The longing for freedom and truth and justice and love that our spirit cries for.  The trauma and oppression of our ancestors.  Thousands of years of gaslighting from our culture.

All of it. Our bodies hold it all.

Sometimes it’s hard to get past all this.  Sometimes the experiences and memories and longing are too much and we need to move out of our body, out of our being, out of our Self in order to escape the chaos and dissonance and get through our days.

That’s okay. We each need to do what we need to do to get by.

And.

Sometimes, we do need to connect to it all.  To hear the stories.  To know the truths.  To sense the injustices of our own lived experiences and those of the people who came before us.  To believe that we aren’t just making it all up, it isn’t all in our heads, it is, in fact and truth, very, very real.

This connection doesn’t have to look or feel or be big.  It doesn’t need to happen all at once.  We don’t need to dive in so deep that the weight of  it all crushes us.

We can move into this work of connecting to our bodies, slowly, quietly, peacefully.  We can get curious and quiet and give space for our bodies to tell us what they need to.  We can listen.

This is the work of re-membering our body.

Of putting all our fragmented pieces back together.

Of coming home into our Self.

Of becoming our own Unleashed Woman.

This is the work of reclaiming our bodies.  Or, perhaps really, claiming them for the first time.  Taking ownership of them.

This is the work of being able to say wholly, fully, confidently:  No or Yes or Maybe or No then Yes then No again.

This is the work of acknowledging all the ways we never gave consent.  We never gave permission.  We never consciously or in any informed way agreed to the disconnection, the dismembering, the disowning of our own Self – of our physical and corporeal and flesh and blood body.

And neither did our ancestors.

Lack of consent is part of how our patriarchal culture works.  Those in power don’t need to ask, and those without power don’t get to say no.

This is as true today as it was 100, 1000, 2000 years ago.

We, you and I, never gave consent for trauma to live in our bodies the way it does.  We never consented to the disease or disorders.  We never consented to our DNA being altered by the trauma and oppression our ancestors experienced.

We did not consent to the anxiety. The depression.

We did not and do not consent to the constant messages of how we are not enough, how we are too much.

We did not consent to the shame that is instilled in our psyches and being from birth.  From before birth.

We did not consent to having our boundaries disregarded, ignored, torn away from us, over and over and over again.

We did not consent to being told that we have no value, no worth.

We did not consent to the disconnection from our Self or our sisters or our community.

We did not consent to the gaslighting or torture or murder both we and our ancestors have experienced.

We did not consent to having all this patriarchal training living within us, burrowing so deeply into our blood and bones and being.

We did not consent to unconsciously and unintentionally passing on this training.

We did not consent to being complicit in this culture that hates women.

We did not consent because we were not informed.

We were not told we had a choice.

We were not told there was, there is, a choice.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that we have to follow the rules.  That we must play small.  That we should strive to achieve that never ending To Do list.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that to rest is to be lazy, weak, proves our worthlessness.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that we deserve all the pain we endure.  Because Eve. Because Pandora. Because all the “evils” of the world are our fault.

Psst… I wanna tell you something…

THEY FUCKING LIED.

xoxo

We do have a choice.

We have the choice to say No more.

We have the choice to say, No, that isn’t correct.

We have the choice to use our voices.  To access our power.  To demonstrate our strength.

We have the choice to stop following the rules, to stop passing on the rules, to stop being complicit in a culture that wants us gone.

We have the choice to do and be different. For ourselves. For our daughters and nieces. For our sisters. For our mothers. For all our grandmothers, long forgotten in our conscious memory yet still living within our cells and being.

And not only do we have a choice, we have a responsibility.

Now that we are aware of this training, now that we are unraveling all the ways we have been lied to, tied down, leashed, we have a responsibility to continue in this unraveling, in finding our truth, in taking off this leash that has choked and silenced us for generations.

We have a responsibility to do and be different. For our Self. For our daughters and sons and nieces and nephews. For our mothers and fathers.  For all our grandmothers and grandfathers, long forgotten in our conscious memory yet still living within our blood and bones and being.

 We have a responsibility to break the rules.  To defy this sick normal. To tear it all down, burn it to the ground, and build new.

New. Different. Creating a time and place where all of us are free and equal. Where we no longer feel shame. Where we embrace our sisters. Where we find deep connection with our Whole Self, with our community, with our world.

This responsibility can feel heavy.  It can sometimes feel like a burden.  We may sometimes want to put it down and wish we were not aware of the oppression, the hatred, the inequality.

That’s okay.

Even Jesus had moments of doubt.

And.

We can do this. Together.  In community. With each other.

Together.  Always.

days-ending-in-y-2Now, let’s go smash this shit to bits.

xoxo

The text of this essay originally appeared my weekly love letter on November 5, 2016 and has been slightly edited and modified to appear here.  If you enjoyed reading this, and would like to read more like it, you can sign up to receive my love letter right over here.

Isabel Abbott and I have locked arms and joined minds and are offering a six month circle unearthing, exploring, dislodging and embracing our consent and boundaries.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly register, click right here.

The complexity of consent Part 2

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consent-part-2Last week I wrote about how sometimes consent is a tricky thing, how sometimes our mind will give consent to something, like a surgery, but our body won’t (and really can’t). How sometimes our logic needs to override our body because our mind actually does know better (for example that a surgery could actually save our lives.

The point being that sometimes the giving or not giving of consent isn’t always a straight forward thing.

And, while that is true, it is also true that more often than not, the giving or not giving of consent is very straight forward.

Like the not giving consent for sexual abuse and assault or physical and psychological abuse and torture.

The not giving consent for mundane and yet traumatic things like car accidents or cancer or any disease or illness.

The not giving consent for other people to break our hearts, or betray our trust, or dishonor us in any of the big or small ways.

The not giving consent for our children becoming ill, our parents dying too young, our best friends suffering in any way.

There are million things in our lives that we do not give consent to.  Some of them extraordinary and some mundane.

All these noes that we may or may not have given voice live within us.  In our minds, yes, and also in our bodies.

Every time our consent is disregarded, our bodies know.  They react.  They store the data.

The data of emotions and pain and the color of the walls and slow motion detail right before impact.

This data lives in our shoulders and necks and jaws.  In our chests and hips and underneath our scapula.

This data lives in our intestines and stomach and womb.

This data lives in our blood and bones and muscles and sinew.

The raw non-verbal emotions, the howls and screams and wails, all vibrate within our being. And not only does the disregard of our own consent, from our lived experience, live within our body and being, that of our ancestors does too.

This includes the gaslighting that women have experienced for thousands of years.

This includes the impact of rape and abuse. It includes not having control or sovereignty over our own bodies or lives.

Yes, there a million mundane ways in which our consent is disregarded. Yes, this all lives within us. And the trauma and impact of these mundane, ordinary things, like car accidents, can be quickly and easily dislodged from our bodies.

It is the millions of ways in which our consent is disregarded that are not mundane, though in our culture considered ordinary and almost unremarkable, like rape or abuse or gaslighting, that takes time and patience and focused intention to dislodge and dislodging is made even more complex by living in a culture that continually and constantly traumatizes us.

It may take a lifetime to dislodge some trauma, some violations of our consent.  There are some things that we will only learn to live with, as we also continue to chisel away at the layers.  The hope always being that the more we dislodge, the more we chisel away, the less the next generation will need to do.

In truth, the trauma of being women living in a patriarchal culture makes it almost impossible to completely heal our bodies and minds and spirits.

And.

As we continue to do the work of unearthing, examining, dismantling and dislodging these traumas we also learn to resist and to prevent more trauma from impacting us as deeply.

We learn resilience.

We learn that no matter what, we will not only survive, in many ways we will also thrive.

We learn that our NOes matter.  We learn to honor them and defend them and demand respect for them.

We learn that our boundaries matter.  We learn how to notice them and feel them and know them.  We learn how to honor and respect them.  We learn how to demand others honor and respect them too.

This is not easy work.  It is messy.  It can be dark.  It can at times feel like we are sinking into a deep abyss.

And, as we build our resilience, we learn that this messiness, this darkness, this sinking into the abyss will pass.

We learn hope. We learn to breathe.  We learn to rest and nourish and replenish.

We learn to wield our consent.  To state that we matter. Our Noes and Yeses and Maybes matter.  Our boundaries matter.  Our voice matters. Our essence and being and life matters.

We learn that as we chisel away at our own trauma, we are also chiseling away at a culture that insists on oppressing us.  As we learn to wield our consent, to declare that we matter, we chisel away at the stories our culture has fed us since birth, since our mothers births, since our grandmothers births.  As we learn resilience, we rip away at leash our misogynist, racist, patriarchal culture has put on us.

As we learn, we begin to do different.  And in our doing different, we take back our bodies, our consent, our autonomy, our lives. And in this taking back, we begin to crumble the bricks of a culture that tries to tell us our bodies and lives are not our own.

And this is how we will tear it all down and how, in the end, we will win.

xoxo

Did you enjoy this?  If so, then I invite you to sign up for my weekly love letter right over here.

Isabel Abbott and I have locked arms and joined minds and are offering a six month circle unearthing, exploring, dislodging and embracing our consent and boundaries.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly register, click right here.

The complexity of consent -part 1

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consent-part-1Five years ago, while still in graduate school, I had a day surgery give me a bigger understanding of trauma and the impacts it has on our body.  That semester I fought to be in the Crisis & Trauma class, it was the last time it would be offered by one of my favorite professors and there was a screaming within me that I needed that particular class at that particular time in my life.  I had to fight with my academic advisor and demand over and over to be let into the class.  I didn’t understand the warrior within me who was battling so hard for this class, there was no logic at that time which said to take it now and that I couldn’t take it later.  And yet I knew, my body knew, that taking the class later was not what I needed.  I needed to take it now.  I eventually convinced my advisor and he got me into the class.

Let’s go back a bit.

When I was 18 I was diagnosed with endometriosis.  In the months leading up to this diagnosis, I had horrible and debilitating PMS and periods.  Debilitating to the point that I missed many days of my senior year of high school because I was curled up in a ball on our bathroom floor, dripping cold sweats or tightly curled in my bed moaning and crying and screaming because of the pain in my abdomen, my uterus, my womb.  This pain led to multiple ER visits and one of them finally led to me being fully admitted and having the surgery that discovered and removed, the endometrial tissue growing outside my uterus causing all the pain.

The whole of that hospital experience was awful.  The surgeon, may he be burning in the depths of hell, completely disregarded me.  He wanted me to sign a “consent” form that would allow him to remove my uterus and ovaries if he saw fit (I did not agree to this, but only because my adopted mom was there at my side advocating for me; I was so doped up on pain medication I would have signed anything).  When I asked him if the surgery would leave scars he let out a smug laugh and said in a condescending voice “Of course it will leave scars!”.  After the surgery, a week or two after, in the follow up appointment he told me I would never be able to have children due to the endometriosis, that I would never be able to get pregnant and if I did by some miracle I would never be able to carry a child to term.  These words, his authoritative words, led to some rather risky and stupid behavior during my early 20s and honestly I am lucky that I survived that period of my life as relatively unscathed as I did.

Fast forward to five years ago.  We had been struggling to bring our second child into the world for years.  Four early miscarriages.  Twice with hopes so high that we finally did it.  Visit after visit to more doctors and being told the miscarriages were “normal” for my “advanced maternal age”. More smugness.  More not being heard when I said, NO! This is not normal.  Not for my body.  Not for my family.  There is something else at play. More being disregarded and dismissed.

Each month was a roller coaster of hopes and prayers and disappointment and tears.  And then the symptoms came back.  More cold sweats while curled in a ball on the bathroom floor.  And now, projectile vomiting added to the mix.  After three months of this, it was my husband who observed this was happening right before my period would start.  And so back to my doctor.  My doctor who had been with me over the last almost two decades.  My doctor who had been with me through cancer scares.  Who treated me.  Who knew that I knew my body better than her.  My doctor who I trusted.

When I told her all the symptoms, and all the fertility struggles, and all the All Of It, she asked if I thought my endometriosis was back.  I sat quietly for a moment and said Maybe?  She sent me home and later that day called me with the contact information of the best gynecological surgeon in Seattle and she had a referral into her for me.  I made and appointment the next day.  And this surgeon, this woman surgeon, listened.  And knew.  And knew that I knew.  And we came up with a plan, including a surgery, to help heal me.

Here’s where consent can get tricky.  My mind consented to this surgery. Wholly and completely.  But my body, my gorgeous amazing body never gave her permission.  And so post-surgery the trauma symptoms, that I have lived with since I was a child, intensified.

Back to my Crisis & Trauma class.  In this class, I was learning how trauma lives in the body.  How we can help trauma move out of our bodies.  What we can do as therapists to help others and ourselves heal from this deep wounding that isn’t only about the stories that run through our minds.  It is also about all the ways our bodies scream out and relive the experiences over and over and over again and how we don’t listen to them.

So, thanks to this class, I was able to piece together that my body was traumatized by the surgery.  That we can actually experience trauma even when we give consent to what is happening to us.  That our body doesn’t always understand things in logical ways.  That our body only knows it is frozen on a table and being sliced open and having metal shoved into it and pieces of itself being cut and torn and burned away.

Our bodies are wise and hold much.  And also, they don’t understand the world or our experiences in the same ways our mind does.  And so, in order to heal trauma, we need both mind and body to be connected and listening to each other.  We need to not try to rationalize what our body is experiencing because the logic and rationale of the body is not the same as that of our mind.

We need to listen and heal.

That class on trauma saved me in many ways.  It showed me how I need to listen, we all need to listen, to the messages of our bodies.  And that our bodies will respond to having its consent disregarded, our consent disregarded in the ways it knows how.

Where this has all left me is in a place of questioning and wanting answers.  I want to know the facts and figures and statistics for women who have been sexually abused or raped and the correlation to “women’s health issues” like endometriosis, ovarian/uterine/cervical cancers.  I want there to be research on the real health impacts of abortion on women.  I want these numbers and this research not to have further reason to take our choices away, but rather so we can have more fully informed consent.

Without all the information, how can any of us ever truly give our consent?

I understand, as well as anyone, that sometimes our mind must make decisions to override the consent of our bodies.  If I hadn’t had that surgery five years ago, and the follow-up medical treatments, I would not have my son today.  I also would still be losing a week every month to debilitating pain and agony.  There are times when logic, when our mind, must prevail.

And in those times, after the consent of our body has been disregarded, we need to come back to her.  Back to our body and reconciling with her.  Back to our body and soothing and healing her.  Back to our body and letting her know in all the ways that in this moment, she is safe. We need to let her know we hear her, we feel her, we respect her, we honor her.

Our minds and bodies and spirits are separate parts of our Self, and they are deeply connected to and intertwined with each other.  This must be remembered.  It must be remembered that we cannot heal our body through the power of our mind only.  We must do other work, body work, to help her heal, to help her release, to help her feel safety and comfort.

By connecting to her, listening to her, hearing our body, then we can heal.  We can heal our own pains and traumas, planned or otherwise.  We can shift from spaces of anxiety and depression (because the health of our body affects the health of our mind) to spaces of calm and peace.  We can feel the interconnectedness within our Self and within our greater world.

xoxo

PS – The first draft of this essay was written a week prior to the presidential election here in the US.  I have debated posting in now, and instead focusing more on the outcome and fallout of the election. However, consent, consent in regards to our bodies as women, hangs in the balance again.  Having claim to our bodies, having total authority over what happens to her is now in question, again.  And so, I have decided to post this, as the first in a series I have written on consent and our bodies, as it does directly relate to all that is again hanging in the balance.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, and oh that warms my heart if you did, you can read more of my writing by subscribing to my weekly love letter right over here.  xoxo

Isabel Abbott and I have locked arms and joined minds and are offering a six month circle unearthing, exploring, dislodging and embracing our consent and boundaries.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly register, click right here.

Social Justice, Awareness and Change

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the-in-betweens-5

 

 

When I was in high school in the mid-late eighties, I was pretty socially aware. Well, I thought I was at least. I mean, I knew about the “secret” wars in Central America and about homelessness. I knew that racism existed, though as a white girl who lived in a white community it was all theoretical and not something I thought I ever witnessed or experienced. I was a little punk rocker with my black hair and black clothes and leather jacket and I would argue about how horrible Reagan was and how he and Bush Sr. would destroy the world. I was in high school when the Berlin Wall was torn down. This means in middle school that horrifying scare-tactic show The Day After was aired on prime time (my dad wouldn’t let me watch it, or the movie Red Dawn when it came to the theaters) and my freshman year of high school we had “air raid” and “The Bomb” drills where we would all congregate and sit against the walls of our middle school, and in the words of my poetic English teacher, kiss our young asses good-bye. There was a lot of anti-communism propaganda and a lot of looking out to the outer world and all the evils there.

The evils were never at home. They weren’t in my home town. They weren’t in my family. My family wasn’t racist. The women in my family weren’t oppressed or silenced. Feminism was something that happened in the 1960s and 70s and wasn’t a thing of a modern 80s girl like me.

I assumed the  history I was taught in school was true and accurate and complete. I assumed the world was safe and that thanks to my mother’s generation I could do and be anyone or anything I wanted. I didn’t have a clue what a glass ceiling was. Women’s “power suits” with the huge shoulders were ugly, but I simply saw them as part of that whole being an adult and working thing that people do, not as a costume women had to wear to try to “fit in” and be taken seriously in the corporate world.

My first week of college was an eye opener. Hell, it was mind blowing and boggling for me. And it shut me down from the enormity of the evils in this world, because if I continued to think about it all, it may have quite literally killed me.

There was an exhibit in one of the galleries on campus of the atrocities committed by Christopher Columbus and his crews. I remember looking at the images and reading the descriptions and the history and being in total disbelief. I honestly could not believe that these things were true or had happened. I had chosen the college I attended (big shout out to the Evergreen State College) because it was a liberal arts college. But that first week, as I was standing there staring at horrifying images and reading even more horrifying descriptions I started to wonder if perhaps I had chosen too liberal of a school to attend.

At 18 I had never heard of the atrocities Europeans had committed against the Native Americans. I didn’t know about Columbus or the pilgrims. I didn’t know about missionaries stealing children in the name of God. I was in a state of shock that first week and month and probably year.

In high school I wanted to be as socially aware as possible – I wanted to change the world and right all the wrongs. After that first week of college I stopped watching and reading any news and buried myself in partying and socializing and doing the bare minimum I had to do in my performing arts program. The enormity of the lie I grew up with was too huge. “Privilege” wasn’t a thing that was discussed in the early 90s and it certainly wasn’t a thing I was ready to examine or admit to. I had to run and hide from the horror of it all—my young and clearly innocent mind couldn’t grasp it at that time. I needed space to breathe and changing the world would be put off for others to worry about. My world was just fine as it was, thank you very much, no need for me to stir the pot so to speak.

For the next twenty years I would not be terribly socially aware. I knew things happened and I heard the news, but it didn’t affect me and it happened in far enough away places that I could hold my view that it was either rare or something special to that particular location on a map.  It didn’t affect me or the people I knew or loved.

I’m not sure what has happened in the last five or six years to help bring my head out of the sand. Graduate school helped. Having friends who had a social justice bend to them helped. No longer being a lonely female in a male dominated profession just trying to survive and climb that corporate ladder helped. I have gained perspective and can look at the system I had been entrenched in and start to see some of the double standards and the glass ceilings and mixed messages.

Something has changed and shifted in me in the last handful of years.. I feel like I can see things clearly for the first time in my life. It may be age and perspective which contributes to a willingness to learn and to want different for my own kids and for all children that is feeding this awareness.  It could be the simple practice of being aware of my Self has the side-effect of becoming more aware of the experiences of others.

Regardless of the whys, here I am. Forty-four and a half years old and being willing to claim feminism as mine for the first time. There’s a long list of whys to this, and what is most important to me right now, is the work I had done for myself, and for others, in becoming self-aware and understanding all the shame and guilt and stories of too much and not enough and how they eat at us and tear us down and realizing, having that a-fucking-ha moment of where all these damn stories come from.

These stories of how we are too much or not enough didn’t start with our mothers. It didn’t start with how they raised us or didn’t raise us. It didn’t start with how they shamed us for being too loud or too quiet or not dressing “appropriately” (whatever that means). These stories have been being passed down for millennia.

These stories are how we survived. These stories have, in some ways, kept some of us safe. We bought into the stories as a sort of bargaining chip so we could actually go out into the world. The long list of shoulds (how we should act, dress, talk; how our homes, children, and lives should look) we internalized because if we did then we’d be okay; we’d be accepted; we’d be lovable; we’d be allowed to live.

Our mothers bought the stories (and their mothers, and their mothers) and they passed them down. How “good girls” dress and act. How if we only did x, y, or z then we wouldn’t be raped or murdered. How we need to be silent so as not to anger a man into beating us. How if we act just so and do just right, we’ll get to live to a ripe old age.

We were taught, they were taught, all of us were taught, to close our throats and stuff our rage and bit our tongues. We were told over and over how we aren’t worthy or deserving. How we don’t matter. How we need to try harder and be different. How shameful our very being is. How we cause sin and depravity in men. How we can’t play the same game as men without being called a bitch or a slut. How if we don’t play the same game we will be trampled and ignored and dismissed.

Closing our throats, stuffing our rage and biting our tongues is one way to survive. It is one way to get by in a world that is truly stacked against us. Yes, it will eat away at us and we will be miserable in so many ways, but we will live and have babies and pass down the same lessons to our children and the system will continue to feed off our terror and tears.

Or.

We can connect to that rage, open our throats and let out of roars. We can allow the anger and frustration and sadness to be our fuel to make change in this culture instead of doing what we have to in order to get by.

We can connect to our body. To feel her. To hear her. To know her wisdom. We can become aware of what is bubbling and brewing and boiling inside us. What was passed down and what is ours. What is history and what is our own lived experience.

We can speak out. We can tell our experience and listen to the experience of others. We can walk and march and stumble alongside others who are also oppressed, held back, tied down. We can fight with them and create change, slowly and quickly, tearing down this culture that feeds off our shame, brick by brick.

We can honor the truth that not everyone is in a place to stand up and open her throat yet. We can hold space for the very real fear and terror that courses through her blood and bones. We can let her know she is not alone, she is okay just as she is, and we will be here to help when she wants it :: we will not add to her torment by forcing her into the world she is unprepared to be a part of.

We can stop feeding the stories of too much and not enough by stopping our own judging and condemning of other women and our self. We can learn empathy. We can STOP FEEDING THE SHAME BEAST. As we stop feeding these stories, this deep shame, they will die. Slowly, and sometimes quickly, in fits and starts as we each find our way to allowing our Self to be.

And the walls will come tumbling down. They will shake and begin to crumble with our roars. And as we each, one by one, add our roars to the chorus, more will find their own ways of awareness and will join us.

And we will be the change we want to see in the world.

Did you enjoy this? It’s from a love letter I sent out in April 2016.  If you’d like to receive future love letters from me, you can subscribe right over here.

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