In my last post, I wrote about being hit hard by what I guess you could call the extreme contrast between my life and the new pope's. It was a hard piece to write, and to be honest, I hit an energetic wall all day yesterday.
But it is a relief, actually. I don't think I ever completely understood how "wiped off the map" I was by the age of 17, just about the time when society as a whole was telling us young women, "for the first time in history, you can do or be anything you want." If that was true for other American women (and I know that it wasn't necessarily, but at least if it was theoretically true in first world countries by about 1973), then it was not true for me. I wasn't enough of a believer to become, literally, a Christian saint or nun, and I wasn't male enough to enter highest expression of the Episcopal/C of E church choral music tradition. My greatest gifts and passions seemed to be complete non-starters. I remember myself at that age, pale, sapped of life energy, just kind of going through the academic and personal motions. The fact that my family went from upper crust WASP to extremely impoverished almost overnight around that time probably wasn't the cause of this distress, but it certainly added to the confusion. I think the entire time I was at Smith (and frankly, most of the time since then), I was in a bit of a fog, earnestly trying to get good grades or do a good job at whatever I was doing, earnestly trying to fit in somewhere, yet feeling like I was marching through peanut butter. Because I tried so hard to stay on top of the spiritual growth piece of the puzzle, I usually managed to avoid feeling the actual trauma of my life energy and passion consistently hitting the wall, and being pushed back in my face.
And in ways, I've been the lucky one. The pushback I received was not, for the most part, physical abuse. I have never been raped. I have never been beaten. I have never been in a war zone. The rejection has been verbal, metaphorical, financial, and often quite subtle. Perhaps that is why it took so long to really understand how painful it has all been. Perhaps that is why it took the appearance in the news of a male spiritual leader of my exact age and nationality to realize how my balloon was deflated from the get-go while his was allowed to rise. It is heartbreaking, and this may be the first time I completely feel the heartbreak.
Ultimately, this isn't about the rather unusual specifics of my life. It is about the fact that the vast majority of the world's women have never truly had the opportunity to self-actualize. It is about the current paradigm almost completely wasting our true talents; the mess humanity is in shouldn't be surprising. If I seem to be fixated on the paradigm shift we are currently going through, it is because a Love-based paradigm is the only path I can see towards women's true empowerment and fulfillment. The cracks of my broken heart are letting in the light of this fresh beam of Love.
PS: My thoughts are with the area near Duluth, this morning, where several wildfires are raging. How unprecedented must that be, in May?
