#but stories that are like. in many versions PRIMAL SCREAMS about the isolation of women in marriage and trapedness/separation from their

[rotzaprachim]

wait thoughts on hades and persephone and selkies 

[radical-healing]

An Introduction

It feels like I have been threatening to start a blog for Moon after Moon at this point... ...but alas, I’ve been finding it challenging to get started— which is most likely a product of my anxieties surrounding vulnerability and being misunderstood in combination with my primal fear of not being loved or seen or heard. I don’t think I know how to appropriately introduce myself in this context--the violence in my past still has a tight grip on my pride and sense of self; it keeps me humble and screaming in the most paralyzing of ways. Most of the time, I try to be my own introduction— a vivid flash of my own soft, my strength, my anger, my light, my human. I empty my pockets and lay out everything I have before you, unafraid. I gave up trying to hide long ago. My life has been informed and shaped by the texts of empaths who came before me. I take myself to pages the way others take themselves to church. I was baptized in the testimony of survivors-- in the bravery of truth-tellers and seekers of justice. Their words are the parents who raised me. Literature is where I took my first steps; stories are where I found my first truths. In a first attempt to explain myself and my agenda, I have isolated quotes from Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure , and I’ve rearranged their order, so as to fit my own personal narrative... Here it is: "Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make." pg 3. "behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. Behind my carefully buttoned down collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment of silence, years of silence" pg 39 "The need to tell my story was terrible and persistent, and I needed to say it bluntly and cruelly, to use all those words, those old awful tearing words" pg 42 "I had to learn how to say it... and [to] say it the way I do-- adamant, unafraid, unashamed, every time, all over again-- to speak my words as a sacrament, a blessing, a prayer. Not a curse" pg 43-44 "I know. I'm not supposed to talk about how long it took me to wash him out of my body-- how many targets i shot, how many women I slept with, how many times I sat up till dawn wondering if it would ever change, if I would ever change. If there would come a time in my life when desire did not resonate with the fury. "Why? I am asked. Why do you bring that up? Must you talk about that? I asked myself the same question until finally I began to understand. This was a wall in my life... a wall I had to climb over every day. It was always there for me, deflecting my rage towards people who knew nothing about what had happened to me or why I should be angry at them" pg 43 Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that change when it comes cracks everything open" pg 48. "Getting past the anger... I've become someone else... I am no longer a grown-up outraged child but a woman letting go of her outrage, showing what I know: that evil is a man who imagines the damage he does is not damage, that evil is the act of pretending that some things do not happen or leave no mark if they do, that evil is not what remains when healing becomes possible" pg 44 "two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand" pg 7 "When I began there were just nightmares and need and stubborn determination... there was only the suspicion that making up the story as you went along was the way to survive. And if I know anything, I know how to survive, how to remake the world in story" pg 4. “Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.” pg 72 "let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true" pg 51. "I am here to claim everything I know, and there are only two or three things I know for sure" pg 52. ... and one of them is that there is no room for my compassion at the conference table.