Heart Reading … Day 59
My personal narrative about the patriarchy
Here is something on my heart — a first draft of my story about the patriarchy…
Karen grew up unaware of what it was that felt so unfair about gender dynamics; she experienced regular emotional injury with no clear perpetrator or explanation. It was not until she was in her 40s that she was able to even name the source of the regular and insidious gaslighting and crazy-making abuses she had endured — not only with coworkers and customers but with family members, intimate partners, and in various social circles. She observed things others either didn’t see or didn’t express any concern about. Things like the near constant way that men were treated — by men and women alike — as more interesting, more humorous, more worthy of attention than women.
When she learned that others (mostly women) were writing about and researching the effects of patriarchal influences over thousands of years, expressed in all facets of life, she became able to articulate the myriad sources of her suffering. But she was unable to find a way to agitate with others in solidarity toward any semblance of justice and healing. The overt patriarchal tones of the past, if repeated today, are being called out thanks to #metoo and #timesup and #ibyinyf... Yet the more subtle and no less pervasive “death by a thousand cuts” persist.
While there were and are countless activists resisting patriarchal oppression and pushing back against frequent incidents of gender based rudeness, disrespect, disempowerment, silencing and minimization, flagrant aggression and subtle hostility, there were no active communities working to identify and uproot the problem. (Are there now?!) To Karen, trying to face the reality of patriarchal pain and suffering was like seeking solid footing in the middle of the ocean.
Occasionally there would be a piece of driftwood to provide rest. There were sisters — and brothers — weaving at the fringes and frays, but over the years … and still … the clarity of direct action that one can find when agitating on climate catastrophe eludes the seeker of solutions to gendered injustice. The seeker of healing cannot simultaneously be the leader, the champion sighting and guiding others toward safety of a shoreline.
No, when there is no true end in sight to the collective treading of water, one can only attend to their waxing and waning daily efforts to call in and sunlight the unexamined, unintentional, and unmindful drivel dampening their feminine spirit.
Now for my heart reading:
The primary sensation is pure joy; joy about the cessation of certain kinds of miscommunications in my marriage, the kinds that irritate a host of small but chronic sorrows. With this joy, the capacity to hold more of life’s essence is growing.
This “narrative” is one that can bring to mind personal experiences of patriarchal trauma for any reader given how commonplace such conditions are. This could dredge up feelings that have not been felt in some time and these feelings could be difficult to let rise up into ones consciousness, particularly if the sisterhood or community one might want to lean on, in order to share such feelings, isn’t readily available.
I hope that my sharing of this narrative — because I finally feel able to do so without being overwhelmed by it — might stimulate feeling and healing and ripple out with waves of feeling and healing far and wide, carrying the masses of us safely to the shores of clarity, right action, and omnipresent, sustained gender-based justice.
